Uncle Jeremiah

Jeremiah Wright's latest public performances have drawn him back precisely to where he serves no constructive purpose: the center of the presidential campaign. Having heard much of what he has had to say, I am left with the impression that this man is both very intelligent and unforgivably narcissistic.

The most controversial statements that Wright has made and has been challenged to defend are two in number. 1) The American government invented AIDS 2) The American government practices terrorism. These are comments that Obama obviously has to disown, even if Wright insists on inferring that the Senator is doing so for purely political reasons.

But what of these two issues? The problem is that the media has lumped together the patently absurd (the American government invented AIDS) with the objectively true (the American government practices terrorism). This slight of hand serves nicely to lump in any who would dare assert that American can do any wrong with those who are utterly delusional and hateful, as one would have to be to believe that our government invented AIDS.

Here's the problem with asserting that the government invented AIDS: there is no evidence. I'm old-fashioned, perhaps, but I like evidence. It makes beliefs more believable. When challenged this week to explain how he could believe such a thing, the highly-educated and articulate Reverend retreated to an intellectually stunted and lazy position of, "well, I think our government is capable of doing something like that."

It is true that our government, and every other government, has done indefensible things. It is true that our government has carried out medical experiments on American citizens. We are capable of those things, yes. We are also capable of eradicating polio and landing on the moon.

But if I were to say, "I believe that the Nazis invaded Switzerland and that the Boston Red Sox won the 1986 World Series", one would ask me, "how could you believe those things?" If I were to retort, "well, the actors involved were certainly capable of those things", one would (hopefully) call me an idiot.

And ask yourself this: if the United States government had invented AIDS to infest the black community, why would it tailor its biological weapon to be carried and transmitted primarily by homosexual white men? That would be a bit like trying to infiltrate the Muslim Brotherhood with Orthodox Jews, no?

The disappointing and self-destructive aspect of educated and respected men like Jeremiah Wright spouting this filth to his community is that it paints our government in the worst light imaginable, as an utterly unredemptive and evil outfit, aimed only at persecuting black folks. Is there any more potent recipe for despair and self-pity and anger?

As for the assertion that the United States practices terrorism and that 9/11 was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost", there is no intellectually honest way to refute this. Readers of my blog know that I am not a moral relativist. I have seen that insidious faux-ideology destroy people I love, and I harbor no illusions about its damage on our society as a whole.

That being said, however, I am also stubbornly empirical in my approach. During the Gulf War, for example, our military targeted and destroyed water purification plants and electrical plants. The ensuing water-borne disease and hollowed-out hospitals caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That's targeting civilians. That's terrorism.

Also during the Gulf War, thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed directly by American bombs. We say this was collateral damage, that we never intended for those folks to die. But, if we choose to drop thousands of tons of bombs repeatedly onto a city of millions, are we not choosing to kill civilians?

What if bin Laden had said after 9/11 that, for what it was worth, he had sincerely hoped that the civilians in the World Trade Center would manage to escape? Would we give that credence?

When American warplanes fly thousands of bombing missions over Baghdad, we are choosing to kill civilians. We may say we don't want to, but we do it anyway. 90% of the dead in Iraq since 2003 have been civilians. That's targeting civilians. That's terrorism.

During the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980's, the CIA funneled massive quantities of money and arms to that mujaheddin. Midway through the war, our government went a step further; it agreed to train the mujaheddin in assassination techniques, car bombs, bicycle bombs, poisoning, and so forth.

That's terrorism, and those are the terrorists that came home to roost on 9/11. These are objective facts, and only something as subjective and yes, morally relativistic, as the American civil religion could castigate these truths as "hate speech."

The most disturbing thing about Wright is the sense I get that he is invested in Obama's failure. If Obama were to win the presidency, it would shatter Wright's lifelong and static view of American racism. Now, one may think that Wright would be happy to be disabused of his notions, but it's not always that simple.

Some folks are so invested in their worldview that they would rather be miserable than acknowledge that things are not as complicated and bad and unmoveable as they had insisted. I have experienced this truth in my personal life, and my heart and brain are considerably older for it.

People with a pessimistic view of life's and love's possibilities are often unwilling to accept that this pessimism may be misplaced. Rather than liberate themselves from their negative notions and live freer and fuller lives than they had imagined possible, they sabotage the evidence of their misplaced negativity and lash out in a self-destructive way, so as to be saved from sacrificing their precious preconceptions, even though abandoning those preconceptions would open the way to a better life for themselves.

Wouldn't Wright want Obama, his friend, to be America's first black president? One would think so, but do not underestimate the corrosive effects of the mentality I tried to articulate above. If Obama wins, that means Wright was wrong about America. Some people would rather sabotage progress and happiness than be proven wrong. I fear that Wright is such a man.

In Wright's worldview, there is no place for Obama unless Obama is an Uncle Tom. After all, how else could a black man ascend to such Olympian heights in such a racist country? Rather than be happy for his friend and his community and glad to have been proven wrong about how evil America is, Wright seems invested in sandbagging Obama in the interest of protecting his narrative. I had that done to me by a woman once, a child now I'm told.

But of Senator Obama and Reverend Wright, which black man is actually behaving like some sort of cheap caricature? Which man is using his bombast to serve the interest of "the man"? Which man is hamming it up for the cameras, tearing down his brothers in this process? If there's an Uncle Tom here, its the Reverend, not the Senator.

What About the Children?

"What about the children?" is perhaps the ultimate piece of propaganda, propaganda's utility being measured by how irrefutable its premise is. Who could argue against "what about the children?" Who could argue against "we fight for freedom?" Who could argue against "Germany for the Germans?"

"What about the children?" was the rationale proffered by the federal government regarding its most recent raid on a religious "cult". You have to give it to the feds, they managed to kill dozens of fewer women and children in this raid than in others.

The government held that young girls were being forced to marry and bear children against their will. So what did the government do? Did it arrest the men in question and charge them with statutory rape? No, it kidnapped the women and committed the greatest act of tyranny, other than murder, than one can commit; it separated the women from their children.

The government decided that it knew better than these mothers how to raise their own children. This raises the quintessential question, to which far too many Americans give the quintessential response of, "well, if they weren't doing anything wrong, the government wouldn't have gone after them."

Where does this assumption of authority from the government lead? It leads to a place where, for example, the federal government makes home schooling a crime. The government will raid the homes of parents who do not send their children to government schools. They will imprison the parents and take custody of the children, with the firm belief that they aren't "being cared for properly."

The crime of this sect was that it behaved in a way that the government deemed unhealthy to the point of being criminal. I will acknowledge that there were probably things going on there that I would consider unhealthy. But to then allow the government to kidnap the children and ship them off to God knows where? That is a bridge I will never cross.

What of the inverse of the government's contention that the children were being subjected to criminally inappropriate behavior? What about the cult's contention that children growing up in American pop culture are being subjected to criminally inappropriate behavior? Isn't that why they isolated themselves?

Look, I don't like the idea of 13-year old girls having sex. But every time I walk out my front door onto the front lines of 21st century America, I see 13-year old girls with children. Why isn't the government raiding my neighborhood?

I find aspects of the cult's lifestyle unappealing. However, I also empathize with their desire to isolate themselves from the insidious and profane "culture" that our government protects and endorses. These cultists didn't let their little girls eat at McDonalds or watch MTV or listen to 50 Cent. We need waaaaaaay more parents just like that.

The people in the cult considered the culture outside their wall to be utterly depraved. So they lived by their own rules. Is that not an American story? If you want to charge the fathers with statutory rape, go ahead, but to arrest mothers and kidnap their children? Isn't that a bit like in parts of the Muslim world, where the raped woman is punished for the rape?

When people are violated like this, we must defend them even if, no, especially if we don't relate to them. When someone gets wiretapped, or arrested without cause, or tortured, or has their children pried from their arms, the first words of onlookers is far too often, "well, I'm not one of them, so I'm safe." Those are the first words. And they are famous last words.

The Hawk

Something utterly unexpected happened during last week's debate between Clinton and Obama: after about an hour, a serious policy issue came up for discussion. Apparently, the moderators thought they could sneak it in after an hour of "who loves America more?" and "at what age do you tell your children Santa is a lie?" and nobody would notice.

Even more bizarre than policy being debated at a policy debate, however, was Madame Clinton's prescription for the issue in question, namely Iran. She proposed NATO-like security assurances to our "allies" in the Middle East to thwart Iran's perennial aggression in the region. Which doesn't exist. But, one thing at a time.

Firstly, the idea of NATO, in which the United States cedes its sovereignty by promising to go to war on behalf of any one of a number of countries who finds itself attacked by a third party, has obvious constitutional and strategic flaws. NATO, as enacted in 1949 was the first permanent military alliance in the history of our country.

It could be argued that it made sense in the context of the Cold War desire to protect our most consistent European allies, but...how to put it?....Saudi Arabia ain't England. And, thankfully, Iran ain't the Soviet Union. But don't tell that to our leaders, who are more worried about who to blame for Iraq than trivialities such as history or common sense.

Madame Clinton's proposal is flawed on both ends. First, for the parties that she theorizes would be attacked by Iran. Saudi Arabia? Would Saudi Arabia come to our defense if we were attacked? Let's just say that a Saudi citizen commissioned fifteen other Saudi citizens to slaughter 3,000 American civilians? In such a scenario, would Saudi Arabia come to our defense and do all it could to uproot such an insidious network? Seems we already know the answer to that hypothetical, don't we?

Since our "moderate" Arab "allies" can not be expected to defend the United States in any real way, why is Madame Clinton pre-emtively signing off America's blood and treasure in the event that they get into trouble in their own neighborhood? Is the House of Saud worth dying for? I respectfully argue no.

And what of the Iranian "threat"? Iran has not attacked a neighboring nation since the birth of Thomas Jefferson. Quite a inconsistent appetite for aggression, no? Basically, Iran attacks foreign countries about 4 times per millennium. The United States is more of a 4 times per decade type of warrior, but that's neither here nor there.

The 20th century's four major Revolutions, Russian, Cuban, Chinese / Vietnamese, and Iranian, all met with swift and violent American intervention. These interventions involved varying degrees of overtness by the Americans. To destroy the Iranian Revolution, America employed Saddam Hussein who, to his credit, managed to destroy quite a bit, even if the original target still stands.

Despite Iran's utter lack of foreign aggression since men wore wigs, Madame Clinton proposes planning America's Middle East policy around the assumption that the true nature of the beast cannot be deduced by the last 250 years of Iranian history. Rather, it will be deduced by her. She, and others like her, just know that Shi'ite Persians aim to violently dominate the Sunni Arab world, and that only visionaries like her can stop them.

How will she deter Iran's designs? By lashing our nation more firmly to the decrepit mast of Arab tyranny and vowing to "obliterate" entire nations. Much has been made of the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad aims to "wipe the Zionist regime from the map." Not to defend this man, but his was a political threat.

He did not threaten to "obliterate Israel"; he threatened the "Zionist regime" in the same manner as every Muslim leader in the last sixty years. They do it for public consumption. Israel is to Ahmedinejad as Iran is to Bush. And Clinton. The source of all the nation's ills, the insidious orchestrators of invisible conspiracies.

Madam Clinton, however, brooks no such ambiguity. She pointed out that the United States "could obliterate Iran." Obama is held to be naive for offering to talk to the Iranians. Madame Clinton refuses to talk to the Iranian president, but obliterating a nation of 70 million people? That's on the table.

How civilized. A woman's touch, perhaps. If threatening to talk makes Obama naive, what does threatening genocide make Clinton? Other than some Hindu god, whose job description reads "the destroyer of worlds"?

I have the sneaking suspicion that Hillary would feel an undue and dangerous desire to "prove" her toughness as prospective commander in chief. She has taken certain steps, such as voting to authorize a war of aggression that has thus far killed and displaced several million people. That wasn't tough enough, apparently; we've now moved to publicly threatening an entire nation with "obliteration".

This astonishingly amoral posture, especially when exuded by a woman, a mother, should frankly scare the shit out of us all. But all it really is is the logical extension of her style of politics: what can not be understood, controlled, or co-opted, must be destroyed.

What Is To Be Done?

"What is to be done?" A loaded question and, not incidentally, the title chosen for manifestos penned by Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) and Ali al-Shar'iati, intellectual architects of the Russian and Iranian Revolutions. It is a revolutionary question, and it calls for revolutionary answers. The debate over illegal immigration in this country has come to the point where this is the only relevant question.

There has been a demographic revolution in this country during the last decade. That much can not be denied. If it continues to be denied, it will result in a counterrevolution that will incorporate the ugliest tendencies of humanity. This issue must be addressed honestly. Both extremes must abandon their delusions, and they must do so now.

First, the left. It is a delusion to imply that the recent wave of immigration is in any way analogous to prior waves.

More people have entered the United States illegally since 2000 than entered the United States legally during the peak of immigration, between 1890 and 1920. Prior immigration, being predominately by sea from Europe, could be regulated. There were strict and specific standards as to nationality, education, financial means, health, criminal record, and so on.

Now, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the United States should allow immigration from countries outside of Europe. As a nation, we made that decision in the 1964 immigration reforms. At that point, the United States was 90% white, 10% black, and nearly entirely Christian and English-speaking.

The decision was made in the 1960's to endorse a more diverse image of what America would embrace as its own. This was a decision that I agree with. The point remains, however, that even when the parameters for immigration were expanded, they remained legal.

There has always been loosely regulated migration across the Mexican-American border. This has been a mainstay of the economy of the southwest since that region was seized from Mexico. These workers, however, were always understood to be itinerant workers, not legal immigrants and residents with the inclination to enter the broader domestic workforce.

In the 1950's, there was a crackdown on such laborers who had begun to overstay their work visas. Operation Wetback, whose name illustrates the coarse insensitivity of the time, was carried out by Dwight Eisenhower. His primary ally was none other than Caesar Chavez, a man who it would not be hyperbolic to call the Hispanic Martin Luther King.

I mean here only to make the historically factual observation that the recent wave of immigration, which has involved between 10 and 20 million people, primarily from Mexico, is unprecedented in the history of our nation.

For the left to compare Irish or Italian immigration 100 years ago to Mexican immigration now is rhetorically too clever by half and historically ignorant. To compare the regulated entry of certain people to an unauthorized and uncontrolled influx of whoever was lucky enough to survive sneaking across the border is to ignore all distinction.

Here is what the left must understand: the scale of this wave of immigration, and its lack of regulation, has no precedence. Illegal immigrants are undercutting the wages of American workers. And if I were al-Qaeda, I'd be taking a good look at these people. Those realities can not be denied.

Despite America's well-documented faults and sins, people want to come here. Many of these people, far braver than I, are willing to die to get here. If there is no regulation at all, if anyone who is able to make it here is allowed to stay and work here, this country will be inundated with uneducated, impoverished millions who do not speak English.

I can not for the life of me understand how anyone could argue that unregulated immigration to the richest country in the world is a good idea. America is a real thing, with real borders, and it is worth being defended. We should not apologize for defending ourselves.

If we allow an unregulated deluge of poor folks who will serve as the cogs in our machine, our society will crumble amid bitter recrimination, where strangers will kill each other over an interview at Wal-Mart. Perhaps Jay-Z said it best, "I can't help the poor if I'm one of them / so I get big, then give back / to me, that's the win-win".

Now, for the right. The right has it right, to a certain degree. The federal government has not only failed; it has publicly refused to do its first and most important duty. The first and most important duty of the federal government is not, despite what one may gather, to invade impoverished Arab states 6,000 miles from America's shore to ward off theoretical attack, but to protect the border of America, which is 0 miles from America's shore. Easy access.

The border is the skin of the nation; if it has no integrity, there is no nation. We should at least have a debate before we give up our nation.

Here's what the right needs to understand: We're not going to deport these people. I refuse to live in that country. And so should the right. Right-wingers are often more coldly dispassionate than the left and, as such, they should be able to realize that the immigrants are not the enemy. The enemy is the government and business owners who sell us out by feasting on helpless immigrants for cheap and unsafe labor.

Right-wingers, including some I love, speak glibly and utter such tripe as "if they walked here, they can walk home." Let me get personal for a moment. I'm typing this blog in a house with 15 other people living in it. I am the only person in this building that speaks English as a first language, and probably the only person here who could produce a valid Social Security card.

In other words, my house is illegal, and I live here, so what does that make me? I live in our new economy, in our new demography. This is my community. A great many of the people who rail about immigration would be physically frightened of walking through my neighborhood supermarket in the middle of the day. I'm not calling them racist; I'm calling them unrealistic.

The immigrants are here. And I love them. I love them because they are my brothers and sisters in the eyes of God. And I love them because they're Americans. They're Americans because they got here. They walked across a fucking desert, leaving behind everything they've ever known, to take the hardest jobs in this country. Why? Because they love their families. If you can't appreciate and embrace the humanity in that, then you have no business calling yourself an American.

So, what is the solution? Firstly, we must shut down the border with Mexico. It will take money and soldiers. Too bad we don't have any left. In all seriousness, it needs to be done, and it needs to be done without apology. Know what else? How about some perp walks for business owners who hire illegals?

Secondly, every person in this country must be made legal. None of us should consent to live in a land where some of us have less rights than others, where some of us can be sent out of the country, separated from our children, for running a stop sign, where some of us are not safe to report crimes or to testify against criminals.

I defy the right to answer this: what would this country look like if all illegals were subjected to immediate deportation? How many doors kicked in does a fascist state make? I'm going to sleep tonight downstairs from illegal immigrants who, on balance, are eroding the tax base and earning power of American citizens.

What do I feel? I feel compassion and love for the immigrants, I feel derision and contempt for my government and the businesses that grease its wheels, and I feel that if we lose sight of each other's humanity over this issue, we will all lose.

That Which Shall Not Be Felt

I hesitated to write about Obama's "bitter" comment, because I'm....what's that word...."bitter" that the media harps on such frivolous bullshit as this and calls it "news." But there is something to be said about why this "story" is getting so much coverage.

When you look at a picture taken by a great photographer, you should study what it is in the photo. Just as importantly, however, you should study what the photographer did not capture with his lens. The point here is that bias often hinges more on what one ignores than on what one focuses on.

How are Obama's comments "news"? How many Americans my age or younger leaked their lifeblood into the Mesopotamian mud the day Obama's words were uttered? 2? 3? 23? We don't know, because the media doesn't care. The media thinks that the most important thing that happened in the world that day was that Barack Obama said something that they thought was "controversial."

After we castigate the media for this talk-soup, entertainment-weekly, monkey-masturbation, he-said, we said bullshit coverage, we can analyze Obama's comment. I think it's important because what Obama said was true. Maybe that's why it's become such a scandal.

The cardinal sin that the media has harped on, as far as I can tell, is that Obama said that Americans are "bitter". Well, what the fuck else would we be? Should Americans not be bitter that their middle class has been destroyed, that their borders are unguarded, that their nation's armed forces and credibility have been impaled on the incomprehensable ideological spear wielded by a silver spoon-fed, draft-doging, male cheerleader frat twerp? Have I missed something? If you're not bitter, you're asleep.

There is an important dynamic at work here. Just as Americans can never acknowledge guilt for anything their armed forces have ever done, they also apparently can not be "bitter" about the results of the policies carried out by their "representatives".

If you tell anyone in the media that American militarism has sown death and misery across this Earth, you will be painted into a corner populated with schizophrenics and pedophiles. If you tell anyone in the media that Americans have anything to be bitter about, we now know that the remedy is the same.

This is a pitiful state for a great nation to inhabit. The reflexively violent backlash at any suggestion of self-critique is very unappealing, and must surely horrify the rest of the world. Imagine if you were among the other 96% of humanity, prey to the whim of a country that refused to even entertain the thought of its own fallibility.

Why is the media so invested in shooting down Obama for suggesting that working-class folks are bitter? Obama is obviously not reflective of the working class, but the media is even less so.

How is it that the media, that most isolated and pretentious and, yes, elitist institution in the country, the very people who decide what "news" is worthy of being relayed to the American people, can call anyone an elitist?

Obama decides what to say to 1,000 people. The media decides what part of what he said should be relayed to 100,000,000. Now, who's the elitist?

Hillary Clinton, of course, was given free reign to prove her street cred after Obama's comments. She told about how her dad taught her how to shoot. She took a shot of Crown Royal in 3 sips. And also had a Blue Moon with a twist of orange.

As a 20th generation blue collar grunt, let me say that when blue collar folks have a beer and a chaser, the have a Bud and a shot of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels. The words "Moon", "Orange", "Crown", and "Royal" do not fit into their equation. Neither is any "shot" taken in 3 sips. Typical Clintonian behavior. I didn't inhale. I took a shot....in 3 sips.

Hillary Clinton's husband makes 100,000 dollars per hour to talk to people. Only God deserves that much to tell us what he's thinking, but God would donate ALL the money to charity. Hillary "loaned herself" 5 million dollars a few months back. Hillary's only chance to win the nomination hinges on "super"delegates, whose votes are deemed approximately 150,000 times more legitimate than the folks Barack Obama apparently lords over. Yes, Hillary's only chance hinges ENTIRELY on superdelegates, but Barack Obama is the one who has contempt for the grunts.

I feel dirty writing about this. I've had 3 absolute intuitions about America in my adult life. The first was that George W. Bush would be president. I felt this in my gut before even seeing the man's face. I didn't know it would take a coup d'etat, but I knew he would be president. The second was the first time I saw Bush say "Iraq" after 9/11. I knew. The 3rd was in 2004. I never harbored a shred of doubt that Bush would remain in office.

I haven't had such a feeling regarding this election. It's like being in love; when you know, you know. And so far, I don't know. Intuitively, I know that Obama has the best chance, but I can't see it. After this latest charade, however, I have the beginnings of a feeling. It's a feeling that tells me that John McCain will be president.

His supporters, technically independent groups exercising their 1st amendment perogatives, will attack Obama as a closet Muslim, a black nationalist, and an elitist. How could a black Muslim be an elitist? Never mind. I can start to see it now.

Obama, being the best American politician in 40 years, managed to slip the Jeremiah Wright knot. But daring to say that Americans could possibly have anything to be "bitter" over, and daring to imply that "bitter" people often lash out, is what will sink him. Not because it's false, but because it carries a burden of truth that we refuse to bear.

The Original

As many movies as I watch, I've managed to avoid writing about them just as I've somehow managed to avoid writing about music. There is a current among movies that I've thought alot about recently, and it even says some interesting, although somewhat formulaic and obvious, things about our society.

We love sequels. I love sequels. But I've noticed that my favorite movie series mirror my culture's very identity in many respects. Inevitably failing to recreate the original triumph, it relies on technology, sex, and violence, to maintain its narrative.

Rocky. Incredible movie. Gritty is the most relevant adjective. I should cite the original dubya, Joshua Walker, on that one. That movie reeked of authenticity. Pauly and Rocky share a beer in the bathroom. Rocky walks to a shakedown, with nothing but his cigarettes and his racket ball for company. The object of Rocky's romantic fixation is not attractive or personable. Rocky loses the big fight. In the sequels, Rocky gets progressively tanner, cleaner, richer, more muscular, and more oily. And he bleeds onto the American flag. To the credit of this series, however, Rocky does end up poor and widowed, albeit happy in a punchdrunk sort of way.

Die Hard. John McClain. Wow, I've never noticed how close that is to John McCain. His campaign should really exploit that. There's a Method Man song with the line, "came to bring the pain now / die hard fans call me john john mcclain now". I can imagine that blasting at McCain rallies. Anyway, in the first Die Hard John McClain is as authentic as Rocky in '76. Real guy. Real problems. Divorced. Smokes. Fucks up European terrorists. Three movies later, he's driving a truck into a Harrier jet. And living. Because he quit smoking.

Matrix. The Matrix is a very important movie. It is the ultimate modern iteration of a timeless fable that recognizes no boundaries across space, time, or culture: red or blue pill? In the first Matrix, Neo's nemesis is a single agent, a certain Mr. Smith. "Missssssster Annnnnnnderson". In the third movie, Neo can fly, time-travel, and turn into Jesus. After he defeats 10,000 agents.

Alien. Watching Alien is a window into the golden age of balance between story and special effects. The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark (two of the best movies in American history, with Thriller-like status for every non-terrorist born between 1978 and 1983) also fell into this phase. There is writing, acting, and the special effects to simulate plausible scenery. The thing that strikes the viewer watching Alien is the fact that there is only one Alien. By Alien Resurrection (I don't like the trend of not numbering movies; it makes Netflix difficult), Sigourney Weaver (still alive, of course, after falling into a vat of acid with an alien bursting from her chest cavity), was killing several people, scores of aliens, and all sort of alien-human test-tube freaks. And somehow, she was still hot.

Rambo. First Blood, like Rocky, is a masterpiece. Again, the lack of blood is almost violently obvious, and ambitious in retrospect; there is a feeling that they respect the audience enough not to feel the need to throw an incessant flow of red meat. Rambo kills 7 people in First Blood, most of them unwillingly. (Parenthetical note: the sequel to First Blood was called First Blood, Part II. Come on. Just call it Second Blood.) I saw the preview for Rambo 4 last month. He killed at least 25 people in the fucking preview. Our society now needs more death in a preview to hold its attention than it used to need for an entire film.

Open up the newspaper any given day and look at what's in theatres. Then find out what percentage of "new movies" are sequels, adaptations of books, remakes, or TV spin-offs. The percentage of movies based on original stories is almost as low as the percentage of characters that are depicted having sex in those movies who are married. To each other. What culture. As John Rambo said, "Do we get to win this time?"

Forever Man

John McCain was a prisoner of war who was tortured and refused early release. We know that. He was shot down while bombing a third world country which didn't get the memo that they had no idea what was best for them. We know that too, although it's hardly polite conversation.

As much as I detest McCain's mission (for example, has anyone ever asked John McCain how many successful bombing runs he had? And how many people he thinks he may have killed? And many of those people were civilians? And what gave his government the right to murder foreigners in their own land for discrepancies in economic dogma?) ...as much as I detest the mission, I sincerely respect what this man gave to his country.

When McCain was taken prisoner, the relative merits of his mission, which in all due fairness he had no say over, were irrelevant. What became relevant then was the man. And the man proved his greatness. Pay no mind to anyone who would deny the singular courage and dignity of this man.

But, he's a warmonger. The reason so many people who hate the Iraq War will vote for McCain is because so many of us have this unspoken compact that it's okay to be a warmonger if you've suffered in a war. I dispute that premise.

Many warmongers have never been to war. Others have been (Gore, Kerry) but not really suffered years of torment (McCain). But their views about the relative merits of current wars must be judged without giving a huge handicap in some misguided and misplaced lurch for reverence.

McCain is wrong on Iraq. Dead wrong. And that's all that matters now. Could the young civilian know more than the old wizened war hero? In this case, yes. Life is crazy like that. Obama was right. McCain was wrong. Period.

One of the best anecdotes in the universe (I urge all to apply this to all sorts of situations) has to do with writing in space. During the space race, the Americans and the Soviets obviously had to learn how to write cleanly and efficiently without gravity.

The Americans tried in vain, and at great expense, to invent an ink that was somehow impervious to a lack of gravity. The Soviets? They used pencils.

Experience often gives people an excuse to overthink things that aren't nearly as complicated as their narcissism wants them to believe. I've payed a price for that piece of wisdom. I imagine many of us have.

McCain says we can't leave while there's violence. So, we can't leave while we're getting shot at. He also says that when we stop getting shot at, that will make it safe enough to stay for 100 years. So, we can't leave after we stop getting shot at.

In other words, McCain is telling the world, and the Iraqi people, that the United States will never leave Iraq, unless the universe invents a category not covered by either "getting shot at" or "not getting shot at".

The anti-American forces, however, know full well that there is a breaking point for Americans; there is a point where we will retreat, even under fire. McCain having just informed America's enemies that it won't even leave if there's peace, has every imaginable motive for war.

Somehow, despite years in a Vietnamese prison, McCain never accepted the reality that people can reject American presence and violence and interference without necessarily aiming to take over the world. Leaving people alone is the safest option 9 times out of 10.

McCain doesn't understand that. That doesn't mean he's not brave, and it doesn't mean that Obama's a strategic genius. It just means that some people never learn. And McCain, we can all agree, is a bit to old to learn on the job.

The Handful

Five years ago today...the night they drove ol' Baghdad down.

I have a nephew that's 5. He's way cuter than Iraq. And I hope he lives in Montreal 13 years from now, if you catch my drift.

I'll write an update on the war in 5 years or so.

The Balance

There is a single balance that governs the success of human interaction, whether between lovers, brothers, or nations. It is the balance between the one and the many. In far too many fora, narcissism sits center stage, and this insidious trend has been adopted as a casus belli by both the Salafists and the Neo-cons. Ironyyyyyyyyy.


Everything is relative. To present-day Americans, the 1950's serve as the archetype of bucolic and wholesome community. It is remembered as a time of monogamy, asexual clothing, and domestic bliss. However, to Sayid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual, that very same community reeked of materialism, lust, depravity, and instant gratification.


As liberalism failed in the United States, leading to an explosion of the very ills it claimed to aim to eradicate, the neo-cons reverted to Leo Strauss' endorsement of a popular myth. This was hardly a new idea, but it had never been so organized. When liberalism's navel gazing and reflexive guilt produced riots, the neo-cons were redeemed.


The popular myth would hold that America was besieged on all sides by hostile powers. Many of these threats were invisible or classified, but they were there. Furthermore, the threats were not driven by national or economic or political motivation, but by evil.


The neo-cons co-opted this notion of good versus evil to the point where they castigated their critics as moral relativists incapable of acknowledging right and wrong. (They were not wholly wrong in this castigation.)


The Jihadis, inspired by Qutb, perceived a similar moral decay in their societies, as conservative as those societies were from the American perspective. The jihadis, like the neo-cons, invested in a timeworn strategy of recreating an imagined golden age of unity and singularity of purpose by stoking fear of external evil forces which were consolidating as the homeland was diverted by decadence. Like the neo-cons' critique of liberalism, there is a hefty grain of truth to the jihadis' critique of kleptocratic right-wing Muslim tyrannies.


The neo-cons and the jihadis both wanted the same thing for their respective societies, but their respective societies ignored them. Until they found each other. They met in Afghanistan. They worked hand in glove there against the Soviets, and when it was all over the jihadis absurdly boasted that they had caused the collapse of the biggest empire in the history of the world, and the neo-cons absurdly boasted the same thing.


The next ten years were spent on lobbying their constituents by the neo-cons and the jihadis. The neo-cons used the Project for the New American Century. The jihadis used Kalashnikovs and car bombs. To each his own. Their constituencies, however, did not seem intrigued by their vision. And then, 9/11.


9/11 and the 18 months subsequent immeasurably inflated the power of the jihadis and the neo-cons; both were vindicated in the eyes of their people.

The balance between the one and the many enters here. The neo-cons and the jihadis each argue for unity of purpose against a satanic enemy. They castigate their societies for failing to exalt the many above the one. The problem, of course, is that neither one of them represent the many. They are both quite unpopular where they live.


So why are they both getting their way? Well, it strikes me that the two biggest threats to peace for the foreseeable future are American antipathy and Muslim antipathy. Where are the mass protests over the neo-cons' use of torture? Where are the mass protests over the jihadis' use of beheading?


America and the Muslim world are tied together and are being driven off a cliff by small factions within their societies. These deranged drivers do not represent more than a sliver of the population. Is that good news or bad news?

Waco

The April anniversaries of the King killing and the Abu Ghraib pictures remind us of watersheds in the shaping of the American psyche. There is another April event that demands our attention, however, the perpetrators of which cannot be explained away as bad apples in the vein of James Early Ray or that criminal mastermind, Lyndie England. That event is Waco.

I remember watching the news that night. I was 13, and still without the faculties to doubt the government's version of events. As I revisit the facts now, however, armed with a good decade-plus of aging, travel, love, and heartbreak, I bring a different set of eyes to Waco, and I am horrified by what I find.

The Branch Davidians were called a "cult" by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Two parenthetical notes here. Firstly, alcohol and tobacco go together, but alcohol and firearms do not. Or should not. Secondly, who deputized the ATF to pontificate on matters theological? Utterly unsurprisingly, the media adopted the ATF's characterization of the "cult".

After the ATF had determined that the group was a cult, they claimed to have information indicating that the group (I lack the self-importance to label it a "cult") had illegal weapons, and a search warrant was obtained for the Branch Davidian's compound.

The morning of the "search warrant", the ATF contacted local and national media, tipping them off to the impending show, eager to bolster its public image after shooting dead a woman and child in Rudy Ridge, Idaho while executing a similar warrant. While the ATF took care to call the media, they began the raid without calling any ambulances. Priceless.

As video of the event shows, the ATF did not execute a knock-and-enter warrant. Instead several heavily armed men in body armor approached the compound. And they started shooting into the building, which housed dozens of men, women, and children. The shooting continued for hours. At the end, when the Davidians allowed the ATF agents to retreat across open terrain without shooting at them, four ATF agents were dead.

At this point, of course, the shit had hit the fan. Federal agents were killed, and nothing else mattered. Looking back, of course, other things did matter. Why, for example, was the ATF serving a warrant accusing a "cult" leader of "child abuse"? Why did they make no attempt to knock and enter? Why did they not announce their approach? Why did they shoot first?

The deaths of the agents erased the absurdity of the raid, the provocative nature in which it was executed, the dubious legality and premise of the entire exercise, and the revolting staging of the "show" by the ATF. And this one fact remained, although it was ignored: any American citizen has the right to use violence to defend himself against any person, including an employee of the government, if that person uses unprovoked force.

In fact, a jury acquitted all the Branch Davidians of murder, finding that the shootings of the ATF agents were justifiable homicides carried out in self defense. Indeed, the footage of wounded ATF men being allowed to retreat across open land without being fired upon belies the image of the homicidal cult. By the time these acquittals were obtained of course, most of the defendants had been roasted alive or shot or gassed to death by their own government.

After the deaths of the agents, the quintessentially American "show" began in earnest. A flood of feds and reporters swamped the area. And the siege began. A siege that included the use of flood lights and extremely loud music to cause sleep deprivation. Just warming up for Abu Ghraib, in retrospect.

During the siege, two things happened. Any person in the compound who wished to leave was allowed to do so by the "cult". Many did. Also, no life was lost by any party. Then, one day, the federal government decided that that was no longer tolerable.

And here began a sequence of events that, in many ways, said more about what kind of country we're living in than anything else that has happened in my lifetime.

Government tanks (yes, tanks) approached the compound early in the morning. From the tanks, FBI agents fired cyanide gas canisters into the buildings. Cyanide gas is a chemical weapon which can commonly cause death among the small or weak, especially when in enclosed areas. It is not tear gas.

Just say it: cyanide. Sound familiar? That's because it's used in lethal injections. Every wonder why the condemned are strapped so thoroughly to the chair? It's because cyanide causes muscle spams so intense that they can break bones. The government fired cyanide into a building full of women and children and wounded men. On TV.

Next, in a pedestrian preview of 9/11, an American tank with a steel truss attached drove directly into the building. Then it backed up. And did it again. And again. So far, the FBI has introduced chemical gas into an enclosed environment known to hold dozens of children. And it has repeatedly driven a tank into that building, slicing a steel truss through the structure. And it's barely breakfast time.

During this assault, there are also agents on the ground, protected by the tanks, firing into the buildings, which explains why nobody escaped alive during this phase of the assault. We can only assume that the armed Davidians fired back, which people tend to do when you use tanks on their women and children. Just ask the Arabs. And then, the fire.

Having introduced massive quantities of chemical gas into the structure, firing copious amounts of automatic gunfire, and destroying fuel tanks, the building caught fire. Fueled by the chemical dust left from the gas, it created an oven of toxic gas. The government, being the government, had no plans for a fire, other than to bar a local fire engine from approaching, for fear of the lives of the fire fighters.

And speaking of lives, 80 people died that day, more than half of them women and children. Shot and burned alive by their own government for the audacity of questioning their authority in actual, rather than academic, terms. These people though that the 1st and 4th amendments applied to them. They thought wrong. Especially the toddlers. But you know how naive children can be.

After the fire burned itself out, the crime scene was razed and evidence was destroyed wholesale. Of the 24 victims found to have been shot as well as burned, we were left to wonder why they would have shot each other. Indeed.

When I was 13, the government murdered 80 citizens on television. They used tanks against infants. They did this because the adults had odd religious beliefs, and the government was concerned that some of them were abusing children. At least now they couldn't be abused anymore. They used tanks, cyanide gas, and automatic gunfire that killed 80 people, and then said that those people had shot themselves and set themselves on fire.

I don't think FBI men woke up that April day and decided to kill children. I think that the government forgot what it was long before that day. And when they tried to violate the religious freedom and physical privacy and security of real American patriots, those patriots, however bizarre their beliefs, showed an actual, concrete belief in the constitution.

When an utterly tyrannical act was properly resisted, the government had a crisis of conscience. It turned to what had gotten it into the mess in the first place: arrogant and disproportionate and unreasoning violence. With this in mind, can we really put Timothy McVeigh in an entirely different moral universe? Devastatingly, no.

Before the War

Still comfortably shy of 30, I am nonetheless already old enough to speak nostalgically of "before the war", a recent yet impossibly distant time when "fellatio" and "lockbox" were the watchwords of government excess.

Four years ago, the above pictures were released to the world. More than any other images, the photographs from Abu Ghraib illustrated to me the real cost to the American psyche of perpetual war and perpetual fear.

It is one of the singular examples of the slippery slope; we begin by torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, responsible for 9/11 and just two years later we are torturing Omar Rahman, age 14, because somebody claimed that his cousin knew where a mortar casing is buried.

Thanks to the inquisitive, though never cynical, influence of my parents, I am less given to shock when government scandals surface. But 4 years ago, when I first saw these pictures, I was shocked.

In retrospect I am shocked that I was shocked. I was still managing to live in a world that had been abruptly snuffed out. I was still living before the war.

King

The 1960's were in some ways even more violent than the 1860's in the United States. While the number of deaths during the Civil War exponentially exceed the number of American deaths during the 1960's, there were individual deaths among American leaders during that decade that permanently altered the American reality.

John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy certainly occupy this tragic pantheon. But Martin Luther King, cut down 40 years ago this weekend, was more powerful than these other men in ways that are seldom acknowledged.

Martin Luther King had a larger impact on America than any person who has ever served in the government of the United States. Chew on that. King is the symbol of a moral reckoning that covered more ground in less time than any other moral reckoning in recorded human history.

To consider the power of this man, murdered before reaching the age of 40, is a sobering undertaking. A man who lacked the coercive apparatus of any government or any gun shifted the very meaning of the word "American" more than all the money or the murder in the world could ever have done.

We must also remember that King gave speeches other than the "I Have a Dream" standard. Towards the end of his life, King said things about the American government and America's role in the world that, in the current climate, are every bit as inflammatory as anything Barack Obama's preacher has said.

King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." That is a statement that the current political discourse simply would never tolerate. It is a debatable assertion, but there is a kernel of truth to it.

It is a rather ironic thing that American society writ large came to accept that segregation was wrong, but that same society was largely unwilling to reject the premise that it had the right to slaughter Vietnamese. There was a connection there that King was uniquely equipped to speak to.

King exuded humanity, and the entire underpinning of his philosophy was the premise that if any people are denied their freedom, then we are all in prison. So while America was right to reject segregation, it had not shaken the sickness, the dehumanization that made it possible, unless and until it fore swore a prerogative to slaughter foreigners who were no threat to America.

That is a bridge we have yet to cross. The important thing about King was that he spoke early and often about that bridge. The slippery slope is another useful cliche. If a culture is willing to treat blacks or Vietnamese or anyone else as less than fully human, that culture will eventually devour itself.

One of the many eerie ironies of 1968 was Bobby Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis on the night of King's murder. My friends and I watched the speech on youtube last night after an immoderate consumption of single malt scotch. The sense of what was lost to America that year is a visceral, nauseating thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IivNv61pDg&feature=related

Kennedy went into the black neighborhood of Indianapolis with no police escort, the chief of police having refused to send any police into an area he was sure would be burning within the hour. And it fell to Bobby Kennedy, a laughably stereotypical privileged brat, to break the unbearable news to a crowd of black folks.

When he tells them of King's murder, a sickening shriek ripples through the crowd, and we are whisked back to a time before cell phones, before the Internet, before cable television, to a time when face to face interaction was still the medium for human communication. And a more human moment could rarely be witnessed.

At that moment, Bobby Kennedy was in serious physical danger. He spent 1968 acting as if he fully expected to be killed, ala Malcolm X in 1965. It is an incredibly liberating thing to be unafraid of death, and it liberated Bobby Kennedy to be the man he was that night.

He spoke to the crowd of forgiveness, of peace, of love, of his own pain over the murder of his brother, the first and last time he spoke in public about John's killing. He quoted Greek poetry off the top of his head. To a crowd of black folks in Indianapolis. And there was no riot that night in that city, unlike most.

Exactly two months after King's murder, Bobby Kennedy's lifeblood seeped across the floor of a kitchen in a California hotel. More Americans were killed in Vietnam in 1968 than any other year, but it was the loss of Martin and Bobby that made those deaths even more pointless.

On Christmas eve of that same year, astronaut Bill Anders took a picture that showed the world what King and Kennedy had seen, but had never lived to see recognized. A picture of a single world suspended in a hostile void of nothingness. Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, whose warmongering forced him to abdicate the presidency in 1968, that said it best. "We must love one another or die."

Here are the last words Martin Luther King spoke in public. If you can listen to him say, "I'm not fearin' any man" without getting goosebumps, you should get that checked out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8&feature=related

The Anger

There is an insidious anger seeping through our collective discourse, the likes of which is somewhat common in the history of our republic, but which is peaking in the present. We are losing sight of the humanity of those we disagree with.

I am not very old or very wise, but I do know this: if you are capable of treating a stranger as a non-person, as sure as the sun rises in the east, you will treat your brother the same way when an invisible line is crossed.

"Community", like "love", "liberty", and "dignity", are not bromides. They are not slogans. They are real, albeit intangible, forces that make us what we are. We, in America, are one people.

How do I know this? I know this logically, since all Americans cede a considerable portion of their belongings to the state. I also know this as sure as I know how to breathe: people are people, and anyone who would deny another another person's humanity is a scourge upon the earth.

The history of the world is, among other things, the history of warring tribes, with grievances and mentalities that ring pathetically petty from earth orbit.

It is still too soon for the earth to move and think and act as one, but what of the United States? Why is it that we are still incapable of recognizing our common "American-ness"?

There is an anger. An anger and a fear. It is held by many. When people are angry and afraid, they look for people to lash out at. Jilted lovers, unappreciated artists, and 1930's Germans know exactly what I'm talking about.

In America today, this anger, which at its root is about a loss of control, threatens us in a dire way, a dire strait, which is based upon a crooked premise.

The American working class defeated Hitler and Tojo. The American government was sufficiently appreciative and intimidated that they subsidized the rise of the most powerful middle class in the history of the world, the perfect bulwark to both communism and fascism.

There was a time, in my father's adolescence, when a high-school graduate could smoke a pack per day, drink a six pack per night, own a house and two cars, put two kids through college, and have a wife that did not have to work unless she chose to.

That time is over. And therein lies the rage. The memory of what was. The question now is, "who will we scapegoat?" Will we scapegoat the immigrants, for taking our jobs? Will we scapegoat the poor for not "paying their way"?

The only hope that the republic has is the public. If we form a circular firing squad of poor folks, of single moms shopping at Wal-Mart that look at the Hispanic cashier at that Wal-Mart with misguided but very genuine hatred, then we are finished.

Immigrants are not the problem. They are human beings. And, if human beings are the problem, then suicide for the holder of such thoughts is the only logically consistent option. I defy any American to deny that they would sneak into Mexico if they could earn 5 times their current wage by doing so.

Law is not the problem, either. Those who clamor for immigration enforcement, such as myself, are not driven by racism or hate. I am driven by love and a sober appreciation for American limits.

We should let anyone into the United States, but not unless and until we can guarantee that they have full protection of the law, proper documentation, and adequate housing. I don't want to live in a country with 20 million non-persons.

I diverted into an unintended specificity with this piece; I did not mean to delve into the immigration issue, but it serves as an example of the larger issue. We must keep mind of our common humanity. Most of us want the same thing. Pity on the nation that loses sight of that.

When We forget that we are We, anything is possible. That's how Hitler started, and that's not hyperbole. When the We ceases to be the We, all the me's in the world don't add up to a God-damn thing.

What Do They Want?

America's civil religion requires us to treat the question "what does al-qaeda want?" as a non-sequiter, akin to asking "what's the greatest speech ever given by a cantaloupe?"; it just doesn't make any sense. Being an apostate to that religion leads me to want to answer that question honestly, rather than to question the legitimacy of the question itself.


The civil religion requires that wherever America is attacked, or wherever American attacks are resisted, the culprits must, by very definition, be nihilism and evil incarnate. Since American motives and actions are held to be universally selfless and beneficent, any opponent of such actions must despise everything that is right, everything that is....American.


This delusion is evident when our leaders, without any influential dissent, endlessly parrot the idea that the hundreds of young Muslim men who have committed suicide in the act of killing Americans do so because they despise feminism and representative democracy.


There is no small amount of truth to this, of course; Islamists despise many aspects of American culture. I empathize with the Islamists in their critique of MTV, for example. And there are many things that I despise about Islamic culture. The question is, would I give my life to express hatred of someone else's culture? No. Would the Islamists? Some, perhaps. But nearly all give their lives because of America's actions, not its culture.


As much as Islamists might abhor American movies or fashion, that is not what really exercises them. Every European state is far more sexually permissive, and far more dismissive of their Muslim minorities, than the United States. Europe is not targeted for attack, however, unless and until its states endorse American foreign policy.


Aren't we much better off with a foe of identifiable and finite grievances, rather than a bunch of suicidal automatons who aim to rule the world in a miserable medieval iteration of an invented past? Of course we are. Unfortunately, we are constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the notion that the Islamists could be sane.

If bin Laden means to destroy America because he can not bear to live in a world with Americans, regardless of what they do, then why does he insist on repeating the same grievances over and over? His three primary grievances are: American support of Israel, American support of Muslim tyrannies, and American occupation of Arabia (first Saudi Arabia, now Iraq and Kuwait).

What do we have to lose by acknowledging that all three of those things are true? They are true. We can say that without ceding any moral authority to bin Laden. At least, we should be able to. But most of us can't.

America has done the three things alleged by bin Laden, cited above. Our leadership has to get its head out of its collective ass and acknowledge what is evident to any child: actions have consequences. Touch the stove, get burnt. That doesn't mean the stove is better than you; it's just how the world works.

Once we acknowledge that the Islamists have rather specific complaints, all grounded in American policy, we can then say, "would it be in our interest to sacrifice anything, anything at all, to avoid such high levels of hostility?" This is a very difficult step for Americans to consider, because we are fed the notion that we deserve to act without restraint or consequence.

The sad reality is, however, that our foreign policy is going to get a lot of us killed. Why not entertain the notion, for example, of ending support for Muslim, especially Arab, dictators? Is the defense of Mubarak or Assad or Abdullah or the al-Sauds worth another 9/11? Maybe it is. I don't happen to think so, but the debate is nowhere to be found.

Ron Paul dared imply that we should at least consider bin Laden's oft-cited grievances, and Rudy Giuliani jumped on him like Paul had just taken a dump on the Virgin Mary.

Here is what the Rudy Giulianis of the world are implying: The terrorists did not attack New York because of anything we had done in the Muslim world; they attacked because they could not live in a world where Rudy Giuliani was free to dress up like a woman and marry his cousin. Mohammad Atta grew up in Egypt and studied in Germany, but when he found out that Americans have freedom of speech, he flew a plane into a building.

When specific actions have detrimental consequence, what rational people would reject the very idea of assessing whether the action was worth the damage incurred? Well, Americans do just that. We're burning our hands on the stove, refusing to let go, the "logic" being that "we're better than the stove."

The irony in all of this is that this refusal to honestly assess the situation has led to an unnecessary war in Iraq, which has consumed lives like snow melting on the sea. Hundreds of thousands of innocents. What we lose sight of is that the United States, the same country that could ruin so many lives in Iraq, failed to use sufficient force in Afghanistan.

This may sound off putting, but our biggest mistake after 9/11 was that we didn't kill enough people. While we desperately need to take a risk/reward analysis of our foreign policy, murder is murder. 9/11 was murder, and we should have killed a LOT of people shortly thereafter.

There were hundreds, probably thousands of people who, directly or indirectly, aided and abetted the 9/11 attacks. The full death-sowing force of the American arsenal was NEVER bought to bear on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That is unforgivable. And that is the price to be paid for refusing to look in the mirror.

We deny that anyone could have any rational complaint with us. When they attack us, we are unprepared, we have no plan to immediately slaughter them where they train, we continue insisting that all that resist are irrational, and then we invade a country that had no relation to the attack, using infinitely more force than we did against the people that carried out the attack. That's us. Who are the irrational ones, again?