Armed Liberal

“You loser. You incredible loser. You don’t have a single cell of taste in your whole body. Not a cell, not a mitochondria, not even a virus. You should get out of the movie business tonight and go work at a 99 cent store where they sell cheap-ass rejects, because the movie you recommended to me tonight was the worst castoff reject-laden piece of shit I’ve seen since “Supertroopers”, and my FIFTEEN YEAR OLD SON even apologized for making me see that. This move had the stupidest script I’ve seen in years, most of the acting was phoned in, except for the lead, who appears to have gone to the Al Pacino School For Cheap Overemoting for this film. The writer/director didn’t miss a cheap or obvious opportunity in the script, and the producer…the same guy, coincidentally, who forgot to spend more than the 99 cents – like the stuff you should be selling instead of working on movies – on special effects WHICH WERE CRUCIAL TO THE FILM.

Not only do you owe me the $18 I spent on tickets, but I want the $400 I would have billed for the time, as well. What a god-damn unbelievable loser you are for recommending this film, and so are all the stupid loser people who are making it the biggest film in the country right now…

What are you doing for dinner Tuesday? Want to come over?”

As you may guess, we saw ‘Signs’ last night.

I did manage to crack up a few people in the lobby as I was calling my brother and leaving this message as we walked out. And the group of teenagers who walked out in front of us has the classic comment ”Jeez, we should have seen XXX”. No s**t, kids, you should have.

Why are you looking at your computer?? Go play with your kids...we're off to the beach, the art museum, and maybe the bookstore...

Received: from hellrimore2983.com ([195.166.233.167]) by mail.mysitehosting.net (Merak 4.4.2) with SMTP id XXXXXXXX for ; Mon, 02 Sep 2002 22:07:53 +0200
From: "SHEIKH SHEHU MUSTAPHA"
Reply-To: shehumusa@email.com
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 21:08:41 -0700
Subject: MUSTAPHA
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.1990
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

My dear friend,

I got your email address through the internet,so do not be surprised.
First of all let me sacrifice my life in this transaction ,by letting out this piece of information i am about to give to you.As a betrayal of this trust puts my life at stake.I have choosen this transaction to be strictly business,so that you would not think otherwise,as you would be rewarded for your assistance.

I am sheikh shehu musa mustapha,a business tycoon from iraq,presently in prison in iraq for the past four years,for my alledged assistance to the american government against my motherland iraq(treason),which i happen to know nothing about.My detractors have finally put me to shame,but i leave them to their own fate.

In july 11 1999,i was accused of assisting the american government as a spy against iraq, i am sure that the outside world has no knowledge this happening,since i did not in any way transact with the american government or any other government,if not i am sure my case would have been making news in the world ,as acase of violation of my fundamental human rights,which i have been deprived of since i have not stood trial since my incarcertation.

My companies assets have been seized, my numerous accounts frozen and as such my family have been living in abject in poverty as i, their breadwinner have been rendered useless in prison.As luck would have it against me,my wives are uneducated and my children too young to pull up a fight.

My dear friend,i do not want you to inform your western government yet,of my predicament,because i stand to loose my life and lives of my family,if that happens now.I am willing to loose my life but i want my family to live and tell the story of my life,since i do not even know my fate now.So please listen carefully and adhere to my instructions if you are willing to assist me.

In the year 2000,some of my trusted aides on my orders,successfully smuggled some of my money out of iraq,without the government knowledge.This money amounting to $61,340,000 was successfully smuggled and lodged with a security firm in holland.But my so called trusted aides as if they believe i am never going to make it out alive,eloped with $20,000,000 of this money,i leave them to their fate.However the documents backing the remaining money in the security firm in Holland was sent to me through my trusted friend Al Farouq,who knows nothing of the contents of the documents,but has kept it in safe hands.I cannot bear to see my family suffer in pain and lacks,so i am willing to sacrifice my life for them to live.

My friend ,all iwant you to do for me is to help me retrieve the money from this security company and secure it.All the documents would be sent to you once i am sure you are willing to assist me.Then i want you to send some amount from this money to my family through my friend Al Farouq,who would in turn help me smuggle them(my family) out of iraq to your civilized world,from where they can now after their safety has been guaranteed,tell the whole world about what is going on in iraq.
Whatever befalls me after then i am ready to take.

I am placing my life in your hands,so even if you are not willing to assist me,please do not let this story out,because it would mean you are killing me and my beloved family.

Iwould appreciate it if you send me your telephone#,since i am entitled to make just one call to my family once in every two weeks.But icannot provide you with any phone number,as the best and only way to contact me is through the internet,which we are provided with as a form of recreation in prison ,though under tight scrutiny,but not to worry the guards here have been friendly to me,besides they do not understand english.

If you can assist me in this transaction,i am offering to give you 20% of the money in the security firm,once retrieved,for your efforts,so apart from your good conscience,iam offering a reward.If i hear from you,i would there after furnish you with the neccesaryinformation.God bless you

Yours trully
Musa Mustapha.

Commenter Ziska writes:

The guerrilla war/ terrorism distinction escapes me. The difference, as far as I know, is that you can have terrorism without guerrilla warfare (mostly because you can't manage guerrila war) but that you seldom have guerrilla warfare without terrorism.

I'm not at all convinced that non-violence would work in Israel/Palestine, or that it worked in India, or that it worked anywhere. There was also a violent resistance in India, and England had many practical reasons to exit.

One form of "moral parity" that I would argue is that if a tactic being used by some present insurgent group was also used by some successful insurgent group in the past, one that has been admitted to the family of nations such as Ireland, Israel, and Algeria, then we must find some additional reason for denouncing the present-day group. Not just because of the tactic.

Posted a serious review over at Blogcritics; it's of Mark Doty's new book of poetry, Source.

Check it out check it out...

Porphyrogenitus fails to live up to his blog title ("Ranting Screeds") once again, in putting together a thoughful and informed discussion of the structure of the E.U. and some likely consequences.

Shameful business, as my son says. We are becoming rant-deprived...

Dan Hartung, over at lake effect: a weblog, has a good post on the number of European refugees who were resettled in WW's I and II.

Take a look, and decide for yourself how to fit the current issues into history...and whether it is 'racism' that we are dealing with.

(link thanks to War Liberal)

Over at Slate, an interesting series by Robert Wright has begun, on Terrorism. So far two parts are up, and in them, he makes these assertions (with which I agree completely):

Proposition No. 1: Al-Qaida and radical Islam are not the problem.

Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people.

Go read it, it’s gonna be interesting. I was referred there by Matt Yglesias, who comments regarding assertion#2:

I think this is basically wrong because at the same time as technology reduces the number of people you need to carry out a destructive attack it also makes it easier and easier for big rich states like the United States to locate their would-be attackers. Admittedly, all our satellites and communications gear may still have let bin Laden get away (though it does seem like he's dead) but even so they let us find and target rather precisely any number of Al Qaeda facilities that would have taken forever to find without 21st century IT.

This high-tech mobilization of radical constituencies needn't be centrally orchestrated. Since 9/11, American pundits have griped about the propaganda issuing from TV channels run by Arab governments. But take a look at the free market at work: The new, unregulated satellite TV channels—notably Al Jazeera, founded in 1996—haven't exactly been a sedative for irate Muslims. The uncomfortable fact is that a free press often fuels antagonisms because people choose channels that bolster their biases. (Which is the most popular American cable news channel? The most ideological one—Fox.) Increasingly, "tribes"—interest groups of any kind, including radical ones—will be, in effect, self-organizing.)

Chris Bertram, as well as Eric Tam highlight the American Prospect article by William Galston on just war theories and Iraq. The key quote:

Saddam Hussein may well endanger the survival of his neighbors, but he poses no such risk to the United States. And he knows full well that complicity in a 9-11-style terrorist attack on the United States would justify, and swiftly evoke, a regime-ending response. During the Gulf War, we invoked this threat to deter him from using weapons of mass destruction against our troops, and there is no reason to believe that this strategy would be less effective today. Dictators have much more to lose than do stateless terrorists; that's why deterrence directed against them has a good chance of working.

In its segue from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, and from defense to preemption, the Bush administration has shifted its focus from stateless foes to state-based adversaries, and from terrorism in the precise sense to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Each constitutes a threat. But they are not the same threat and do not warrant the same response. It serves no useful purpose to pretend that they are seamlessly connected, let alone one and the same.

Before I get into it, let me explain that I am not today waving flags to encourage an invasion of Iraq. I am a fence-sitter, probably tipped slightly in favor of invasion but anxious about the prospect that will face us afterward.

But as to this argument, I have a serious problem. First, that any WMD attack on the US (or any of our forces protected proxies) will certainly not be readily traceable to Saddam, or anyone else with the absolute level of proof that I believe would be required before some people would grudgingly support the idea of war.

Remember that there are many who do not today believe that Al Quieda was behind 9/11, and it is unlikely that we will get access to video of Saddam handing Joe Terrorist the keys to a truck loaded with smallpox ampoules, or of Saddam pushing a big red button labeled “Blow Up Tel Aviv”. As I have discussed below, the probable response looks more like:

“Wow!! Bummer about Tel Aviv!! Who would be crazy enough to smuggle a nuke in there? Wasn’t us, promise!! No, really!!”

While the tame game theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like:

If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my wellbeing.

Let’s talk about this for a minute.

I will not pretend to be an expert on warfare, conventional or otherwise, but I have studied and practiced a number of ‘real world’ martial arts for a number of years.

And the consistent most significant problem that is shared by all of them is ‘threat identification’; i.e. how do you know who is a threat and who isn’t? It's easy to know on the mat or at the shooting range, but much muddier out in the streets and alleys of the real world.

...actually, I just realized that this is a longer and more significant point than I originally thought, and will polish it and try and post later today. Sorry about that!

Chris Bertram emails:

From the preface to Hobbes's De Cive:

Relevant to your latest post, I thought.

The more things change...

Over at Blogcritics, they’ve got an interview with Homer Flynn, graphic artist for The Residents.

If you’ve been listening to Jon Bon Jovi for your whole musical life, you may not know them; they are a troupe of two men and two women, along with associates, who record and perform some of the most amazing pieces around.

I saw their performance of the King & Eye here in LA, and it probably ranks with one of the most amazing concerts or dance performances I’ve ever seen. In it, they deconstruct American music, culminating in…wait for it…Elvis.

Go check these guys out. As far as I’m concerned, The Residents and Survival Research Labs alone justify the entire artistic pretentiousness output of the San Francisco Bay area…

OK, it's getting interesting, and I have to finish reading a 300 page document in time for a 0900 interview in BFE tomorrow morning. So comments will be delayed until tomorrow afternoon.

But meanwhile, read Part 3 of Wright's article, then read Eugene Vokolh's reply, and think about them...

‘Threat assessment’ is something I mentioned in the post below; it is a simple concept. Martial arts skills can be crudely divided into two parts: what to do and when to do it.

The ‘what to do’ part is more easily taught, and is what is studied in dojos and on traditional shooting ranges. The ‘when to do it’ part is more complex, both because it deals with real-life situations in which there are many uncontrolled variables, and because it introduces the element of uncertainty and risk.

Uncertainty is important because in real life, threats seldom walk up to your door, knock, and introduce themselves as threats (actually, two of my favorite cinema bits…the ATM mugger in “LA Story”, who introduces himself as “Hi, my name is Bob and I’ll be your robber tonight.”; and the brilliant Wile E Coyote v. Bugs Bunny cartoon...have threats that introduce themselves). So you have to make a decision, and the problem is that on one hand the decision probably shouldn’t be to shoot anyone who seems vaguely menacing, nor should it be to wait until that vaguely menacing guy is within Tueller range or worse, has you in “the hole” (a close enough distance where being armed or skilled isn’t enough to overcome the element of surprise, and where a skilled opponent could effectively control you). These concepts are important, because they add the variable of ‘potential threat’ that must be assessed. A guy with a knife is not necessarily a significant threat to someone with a gun, until the opponent is within about 21 feet…the Tueller range at which someone can close and strike before a typical person could unholster and shoot. A skilled jujitsu practitioner will most likely control, disable, and kill an armed opponent if the fight starts with the two within arm’s reach.

The best class I have ever seen (although I did not take it) in dealing with this issue is the IMPACT/Model Mugging series. They teach their students to actively interact with potential threats, which allows you to make the determination of risk at a range you select. When I walk up, the IMPACT student is taught to say “Excuse me, but you’re coming too close to me,” and then escalate from there depending on the response. If this were directed at me (affable, but sometimes irritable), I’d back up, and probably shake my head at the oversensitivity and lack of trust in the modern world. The Bad Guy won’t, and that difference in behavior lets you know what you are dealing with.

My role model Clint Smith puts it pretty well: "You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work."

This is relevant to our situation in the ME, because we are, as they would say in the South, all full up with ‘what to do’ and pretty well dry on ‘when to do it’.

Neither the leadership of the country nor the citizenry has really come to any resolution on what constitutes a threat, and how we agree we can appropriately react.

I genuinely believe there are people who wonder why we haven’t turned the Middle East into glass in response to 9/11, as I believe there are folks whose response to two nukes and smallpox in U.S. cities would be “but killing all those innocent people won’t bring back the dead”.

Somewhere between those two factions, we’d better come to a conclusion on the level and source of the threat and our response and do so fairly quickly.

I read Part 3 of Wright’s article with glee…while he and I differ slightly (and I think he’s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done)…we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset…a meme…to which I’ll add that this meme is rooted in a philosophical tradition here in the West...which must be addressed.

I’ll follow up with an amplification of his points, but want to first address Eugene Volokh’s response to him.

Here are some key points made by Volokh:

But I think Wright is missing an absolutely fundamental point: Trying to get people to love us -- especially the sorts of people who might become suicide bombers, or even cheerleaders for suicide bombers -- may actually make them love us less. The problem with appeasement isn't some abstraction about honor or sticking to one's guns. Appeasement is often in a very basic way counterproductive.

…

So the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive -- except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we'll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists.

What then, should be done, given the risk that small groups could kill millions of Americans? I don't know the answer to that. But I am pretty sure that while technology may have magnified the power of small groups (for good and for ill), it hasn't repealed basic laws of human nature: Behavior that is rewarded, as I mentioned, gets repeated. The violent appeased come to demand more and more of the appeasers, and come to have more and more contempt for the appeasers. And to the extent that willingness to murder becomes an effective weapon in deterring us, the result will be more groups that choose to use that weapon against us.

First, that he would be right if in fact Wright’s point was to lavish the potential terrorists with love, instead of threats of violence. But my take on Wright’s point is more subtle. He says:

The Philippines escapade resulted from taking the phrase "war on terrorism" literally and thinking of the enemy as a finite group of warriors, rather than a contagious mind-set that may spawn new warriors faster than you kill the old ones. We mounted a "show of force"—something that may work when you're trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance. This suggests Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously makes sense more often than in regular wars.

Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.

Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

Number 3 is useful because it lets us decide to target the origins of the problem, rather than the symptoms. Now here, as in first aid, we must be aware that the symptoms can kill us, and that they need to be managed. But the simple fact is that the costs of terrorism are so low, relative to the costs of defending effectively against it, that we will be bankrupted (forgetting the moral and political consequences of a tight terrorism defense) if we allow it to continue. We must both find ways to defend ourselves, and simultaneously find ways to carry the attack to the sources of the problem…which may require a war where the weapons are ideas.

Number 4 is critical. It is about the difference between ‘bluster’ and ‘threat’. Because we can effectively turn the whole of the Middle East to a glass plain, we expect our to be respected and our desires to be obeyed, or at least considered. But because of the (literally, if you’re a Believer) apocalyptic nature of our response, it’s also clear that there’s a pretty high threshold for triggering it.

On the other hand…does anyone else remember the story in the 80’s about the Russian response to a kidnapping of one of their embassy staff in Beirut? This was when Western diplomats and journalists were being kidnapped and held hostage fairly frequently. The story was, and I remember reading this in the paper at the time, that the Russians had sent over a spetsnaz team, who kidnapped members of the clan who did the kidnapping, and sent several of their body parts in lieu of cash to the kidnappers…who promptly released the hostage, and never took another. We parked aircraft carriers off the beach and sent a bunch of negotiators.

Which was the effective response?? And, in the context of who we are and want to be, how do we duplicate the effect of the effective response? I’m not exactly sure, but it involves small, quiet, probably lethal actions in lieu of the large and loud actions we tend to take.

Check out the latest Field Poll (requires Acrobat Reader); After shooting himself in the head at least three times by my count, Simon only trails Davis by 6 points...down, Ann!! Down! Please don't hurt me!!

I just finished Embattled Dreams, the latest by Kevin Starr, and believe me, I'm inclined to vote for Earl Warren over these morons, and he's been dead for a long, long time...

E-Gray : Government favors at auction prices - Gray Davis.

Via The Indepundit.

In Erin O'Connor's academic blog, she details the incoming orientation for Brown frosh-of-color.

That pomp is also a politics: the TWTP web site offers a remarkable explanation for why well-heeled, privileged Brown students should choose to call themselves "third world" students. It's a remarkable explanation, which I quote here in full:

Students first began using the term "Third World" over "minority" because of the negative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word "minority" is often associated. Although the term "Third World" may have negative socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating form the Civil Rights Movement.

Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, by pioneering a "Third Way" meaning an alternative to the ways of the first world (U.S. & Europe) and also the second world (USSR & Eastern Europe). When students adopt the term "Third World", they use it in the sense of a cultural model of empowerment and liberation.

Brown students of color continue to use the term "Third World" in a similar fashion: to describe a consciousness which recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse communities. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity for people of color to define themselves instead of being defined by others.

The concept of "Third World" has special meaning for minority students at Brown. It is not to be confused with the economic definition of the term used commonly in our society today, but understood as a term that celebrates the cultures of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino, Multiracial and Native Americans.

TWTP thus understands itself as a local materialization of Frantz Fanon's vision of resistance to oppression and colonialism--a vision that was explicitly violent in nature: "Violence," Fanon argued, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." The TWTP website glosses over the fact that Fanon's "Third Way" was the way of revolution, that his notion of liberation involved completely destroying the present world order. But in affiliating itself with Fanon's vision and vocabulary, TWTP nonetheless expresses a distinctly militant perspective on what exactly constitutes racial empowerment. The Wretched of the Earth, hailed by TWTP as the origin of Brown's ideal "cultural model of empowerment and liberation," was hailed by its publisher as "the handbook for the black revolution." A Marxist account of Fanon's experiences in Algeria during its struggle for independence, the book outlines the role of class conflict in the creation of a new nation's national consciousness, arguing that postcolonial African nations will implode if they merely replace white leaders with black ones while conserving an essentially bourgeois capitalist social structure.

Sorry, but real life continues to interfere with time in front of the computer; yesterday Tenacious G (my SO) managed her re-entry motorcycle ride into the Santa Monica mountains, where we met and breakfasted with friends. She hasn’t ridden in the mountain roads since her two accidents last year, and to be blunt, I haven’t exactly encouraged her.

She did great, a good time was had by all, and I will slowly learn to give up trying to ride her motorcycle and mine at the same time. It’s not easy to live in anxiety about someone you care for, but in order to care for them you have to respect their choices…even the ones that make you anxious.

This somehow plays into today’s Steve Lopez column in the LA Times (signin ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), in which he tells the story of a young man who ultimately succeeded in committing suicide, despite the efforts of his mother to protect him. He ultimately shot himself with his handgun – which had been taken away by the LAPD when he had been picked up and taken in for evaluation, and then given back by the LAPD when he was not admitted.

We have a terrible mental health system here in California, where care for ill people takes a back seat to ‘respect’ for their rights, and a desire not to spend any money on them. The results can be seen daily on Main and Los Angeles streets downtown, where the homeless congregate. And can be seen in this small tragedy.

And above all the policy issues, we want to make things better and to keep our children safe.

So again, in today’s Times, an article about a high school here in Southern California which is being used as a testbed for surveillance technology, in part because

” Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling products out to corporate America.

For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills' system, PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks, stadiums--even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping district in Santa Monica.

Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than their parents.”

Anyway, a great dinner with friends last night, too much Big House Red, lunch and a movie today with my brother (who still owes me for this), and another dinner with friends tonight.

It’s a rough life, isn't it?

But I'm working on a review of Embattled Dreams and some other stuff...so please come back tomorrow!

Scanning the blogs at lunch, I came across Jeff Cooper’s link to Jeanne d’Arc’s post about the Manhattan ‘wilding’ arrests, and the news that a recent confession and DNA testing are set to exonerate the youths convicted back in 1989.
Jeff’s reaction is cautionary:

The large quantity of cases reversed by DNA evidence over the past several years ought to give us pause as the government seeks broad new investigative and prosecutorial powers as part of the war on terror. Much as I admire prosecutors (full disclosure: my wife was a deputy prosecutor in Indianapolis for five years), there is a tendency—not invariable, but nevertheless real—on the part of police and prosecutors to sink their teeth into particular suspects and hold on regardless of contrary evidence. Why should we be confident that prosecutorial abuses would be less of a problem in secret or military courts with secret evidence than they are in the public trials that produced verdicts that we now know were erroneous?

A lot of people say that September 11 changed everything, which is nonsense, of course, but it changed a lot of things, among them Americans' willingness to set aside the Constitution and launch wars that no one can explain. Some stories change the way we view the world, and the story of the Central Park jogger was one of those. It emboldened people who were already filled with hate, and made those of us who weren't a little more defensive. I, for one, grew more embarrassed by people like Al Sharpton, who seemed to cry racism at every turn. (It should be noted now -- for whatever it's worth -- that one of the few people to stand up for the Central Park "rapists" was Al Sharpton). I became less likely to wonder if racism lay behind an arrest. I assumed the boys were guilty. And I became more likely to assume that if a nagging suspicion that something was wrong tugged at me, I was simply guilty of having an embarrassing "bleeding heart."

The revised story wasn't widely covered. It won't have an emotional impact on as many people as the original story had. It probably won't change anything big.

But it will make me trust my bleeding heart again. And nobody's going to make me feel embarrassed or defensive about it.

But none of this changes the fact that I’m proud because we live in a society where we are willing to face up to and admit our mistakes. To correct them where possible. No politically connected prosecutor was able to bury the confession or prevent the DNA testing that ultimately appears to have exonerated them. I’m thrilled that we have been able to take the fruits of our technology and apply them, fairly and objectively to support the interests of people who would normally be beneath consideration. I’m excited because I believe that these tools…the technology and the open legal system…that are the product of this society will be used in the future to prevent bad things from happening…like convicting the wrong people of horrible crimes.

I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.

I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people's lives…comes from a belief in progress.

We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

From frontline: faith and doubt at ground zero | PBS.

Maybe this blog is my way of reaching out and holding hands with all of you. Nothing I write today or tomorrow can touch the magnitude of my feelings on this, so I'm going to step aside and ask that everyone reading this just reach out and hold someone's hand. Tomorrow night I'll write my Congressman and Senators, and put the letters up here.

The Hon. Dianne Feinstein
Senator from California
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington D. C. 20510

The Hon. Barbara Boxer
Senator from California
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

The Hon. Jane Harman
Congresswoman, 36th District
229 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Senator Feinstein, Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Harman:

Senator Feinstein, I met you when you were on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and I worked on affordable housing projects in Chinatown with CCHC.
Senator Boxer, I similarly met you when you were a Supervisor in Marin.
Congresswoman Harman, we met in Venice at one of the first coffees hosted for your first campaign.

I have followed all your careers with interest, and while we may not agree on all issues, I am thrilled to be represented by three capable and forceful women such as yourselves.

But I am writing all of you today – on September 11th – in response to the anniversary and to what I see we have done and left undone in the intervening year.

Overall, I believe that we are doing a terrible job. We are vacillating between belligerence without real menace and accommodation without action. You – the visible leadership in Washington – appear to those of us at home to be more concerned with political advantage and advancing pre-existing agendas than in securing the safety of our children. No one appears to be taking this with the level of seriousness or commitment that will be necessary to see our way through this.

I expect more.

The money used to kill our people came from the dollars we spent to fill our gas tanks. No one will take us seriously, nor should we be taken seriously, until we do something to reduce our dependence on imported energy and our use of energy overall. A gas tax to encourage reduced consumption has been avoided for decades, as our railroads become rights-of-way for fiber optics and our dependence on trucking and taste for SUV’s increases our thirst for oil. We will have to better exploit our own reserves, and the environmentalist in me is willing to trade away some measure of greater exploration and exploitation for meaningful overall reductions in consumption at the retail end.

We must continue to aggressively support Israel, both because the Israelis represent a model for democracy and development in the Middle East, and because Palestinian and Al-Quieda terrorists are brothers in ideology and in the means they are willing to use against the hated West. But there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the average Palestinian, and we should, independent of UNRWA, begin to find our own ways to encourage trade and education in the Palestinian territories, and begin to cultivate, support and protect the moderate people who live there and who are the real hope for peace.

As to Iraq, Senator Feinstein’s speech on September 5 was fine, to a point. I believe that it is important to build and keep alliances where possible, and certainly believe that an effective inspection regime (which we have never had – I will direct you to Charles Duelfer’s article in the September Arms Control Today – online at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_09/duelfer_sept02.asp) should be tried before overwhelming military action. But the reality is that we have allowed a toxic hatred of America to become the platform autocratic, ineffective regimes use to keep themselves in power. And as long as we do that, there will be an endless crop of angry young men and women who can be armed with the weapons purchased with our money recycled, as it were, from gasoline into violence. Iraq is a key and vulnerable link in the team of nations that is forming to oppose our interests in the world…and to do so by brutally oppressing the hopes and dreams of the average citizens who live there. Nothing short of absolute and unfettered access…not the kind of playacting that Scott Ritter saw (before his dramatic and unexplained conversion)…should keep us from enforcing the terms of the ceasefire agreed to by the Iraqi government at the conclusion of the war that they started. And opponents of an immediate invasion should be absolutely clear and resolute that absent such real and useful inspections, the terms of the ceasefire will be enforced by whatever means the Iraqi government makes necessary.

We must implement effective domestic security measures. I am friends with a number of members of the police and military forces, and their opinion, which I echo, is that we have a Potemkin Village of a security system…designed to look good on television or in front of your hearings, but of doubtful effectiveness. We are imposing massive, top-down bureaucratic structures in the hopes of solving critical problems…just as those kinds of structures are being proved relatively ineffective in the corporate world. In this month’s Atlantic magazine is an excellent article by Bruce Schneier on security. A few quotes:

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don't exist. "The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have ..." He laughed. "The only ideas I've heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back." Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs's principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn't help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

I have two teenage sons and one in first grade; it is for their sake that we must sacrifice, must be smarter, and most of all, must be determined to bring these issues to a conclusion in our lifetime, not theirs.

This is a rare time to be in our government. You are each blessed and cursed by being in office now. My thoughts are with you, and my eyes and the eyes of my neighbors are on you.

From the controversial Salon piece, ”Forbidden thoughts about 9-11: Readers respond”:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide -- lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.

- Name withheld

I played the part, of course; I expressed the mandatory shock, outrage and sadness while watching events unfold with co-workers. I was, in outward appearence, the very picture of solemnity and sympathy. Inside, though, I was excited. I got the same weird sense of roller-coaster joy I do when a hurricane comes up the coast or a blizzard shuts down the city. In the chaos of the initial reports, I found myself disappointed to find out that some of the early reports of additional targets being hit were erroneous.
As the second tower collapsed, I found myself with a terrible sense of satisfaction. It was almost like, somewhere deep in the parts of my soul that don't see the sun, I was rooting for the event to be even bigger -- for it to cut so deeply through the banality of daily life, that things would never be the same. I suspect I am not alone. Whether it's shark attacks, wars, school shootings or child abductions, something in human nature gives people a sick thrill in such horrific voyeurism. That's what drives the infotainment industry we like to call the nightly news. In the Civil War, spectators went out to watch the battle.
Until fairly recently, watching public executions was regular entertainment for the masses. Few have the guts to admit it publicly, but we're all monsters.

-- Michael Middleton

For nearly every single day since Sept. 11, 2001, I've been saying, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" The dirty secret that I've never revealed to anyone is that there's a part of me that actually wants it to drop. Rationally, not really -- I've got family and friends who would be in serious danger if something happened in our major cities.

But the little devil on my shoulder keeps saying, "Come on already, let's get this fucking apocalypse OVER WITH." I mean, there are times when I'd almost feel relieved if something happened -- it would be better than this awful waiting accompanied by an overwhelming sense of looming doom.

-- Female writer, living in Texas

...emphasis added

I’m suddenly finding myself becoming a fan of banality.

Full of news some good, some bad, some awe-ful. The fool with 'Daddy's Money' is back in the race for Governor against 'SkyBox' Davis. There's a ship which may be radioactive off of New Jersey. Bush gave a damn good speech, and the hopes in my letter below seem to be being supported.

Close to home, some terrible news about Warren Zevon, who I don't know, but who is a friend to Brian Linse, who I do. I've been glancing at my poetry books, trying to readjust my attitude, when this came to mind:

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

“Two Cities”, by Mark Doty

I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,

brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn't see
that we ruined, finally,

ourselves - what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;

the promises of change seem hollow,
the poor and marginal hopelessly marginal,
endlessly poor. I saw no progress,

and the steeping ink of this perception
colored everything, until I felt surrounded
by weakness and limit, and my own energies

failed, or were failing, though I tried
not to think so. I awoke
in Manhattan, just after dawn,

in the tunnels approaching Grand Central:
a few haunted lamps, unreadable signs.
And with a thousand others,

Each of us fixed on the fixed point
of our destination, whatever
connection awaited us, I spilled

up the ramp and under the vault
and lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street,
looking for the Carey Bus.

The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,

on an office building's intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,

glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city's dream

of itself, the made world's
angled assault on heaven.
The city was one splendidly lit idea -

its promises intact and held
in a disturbed, golden suspension.
Weeks later, there was a second city;

not really a city at all:
nights, in the coastal town
where I live, voices, engines

cough over the water
from the end of the pier
where trawlers cluster

and fog-rimmed lamps shimmer
the undulant harbor, so that wharf’s end
becomes a distant city,

foreign, storied: extended downward
in the flung glitter of reflection
(as if it floated, on pylons of light,

above a gilded, Oriental double,
domes and towers blurred by rising smokes)
and radiating upwards, also, above itself,

in the mist’s ethereal wash: a Venice,
a city dreaming itself into being?
Had I walked out there,

as I have, some nights,
I wouldn’t have reached it;
That city’s coherent only from this distance,

a fable, a Venice not merely
because it is built on water,
but because it is built,

even though it is the capital of inwardness,
built and erased and drawn again
as surely as Manhattan is:

liquid avenues, archives of all
we’ve imagined, our haunted, interior architecture
"Venice," Nietzsche said,

"is a city of a hundred solitudes."
New York is a city of ten million,
And my American Venice

- phantom boulevards rippling
and doubled in the dark - a city
of two hundred and fifty million

solitaires, the restless dreamers'
dreamed magnificence: our longing's
troubled mirror, vaporous capitol.

I feel in my gut that posting this entire work is probably a violation of Doty’s property rights; I hope that some people will buy his book and get him paid a bit for it. After doing it twice tonight, I won’t do it again.

But to me, this poem perfectly symbolizes the antidote to the anomie and despair below. You don’t need brutality and death to transcend despair; the human mind and soul can find it in the brilliant smudge of sun on a building’s wall, and in the appreciation for the “banal” works of humankind, for ‘the made world’s angled assault on heaven’.

William Burton lays out our foreign policy pretty damn clearly. A sample:

So, remember. We don't want to kill anyone and we'll try hard not to, but if we have to defend ourselves we will. Don't think that any bad stuff that may happen is intentional. It's not. We're just as likely to fuck up as anyone else, we just do it with bigger ordinance. And if there's any way to interpret what we say in a way that doesn't make you angry or sad, that's the way we meant it. Honest.

We'd also like to apologize for not learning your languages. We bought the tapes and have been meaning to get around to it, but the game was on and a friend came over with some beer. Next thing we knew it was 3am and we were on our way to Padre. You know how it is.

Well, two of my favorite bloggers are having a dustup over fun, of all things. Instapundit and Ted Barlow are bickering over Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the idea that:

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ''One Less Car'' T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

This is funny, but it's a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it's cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people -- I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?

Glenn has fairly complained about liberals who look at the Right as if it's always and everywhere Birmingham in 1963. Then he turns around and talks about the left as if it's always and everywhere Berkeley in 1985.

First, and foremost, am I the only one who caught a whiff of self-depreciating irony in Beam’s column? The last half of the paragraph above drives the skewer right home:

Who would you rather be? Goo-goo good guy Warren Tolman, painstakingly explaining his position on the School Building Assistance Program? Or Mitt Romney, who has his own, no-frills education plan: Send them to (private, tony) Belmont Hill! It worked for his kids - why won't it work for everybody?

The danger of daily punditry is that quick reads miss obvious things, and we’re all reading too damn quickly. I think that Beam’s column was a bit of pointed fluff, that Glenn picked up on it to beat one of his favorite dead horses, and that Ted rose to the bait like a trout.

Look, here’s the deal. There are a bunch of people in the world…on the left and right…who are pissy and unhappy by nature. They tend to become bad bureaucrats and bad pastors. Somehow, about the time George McGovern got nominated, they captured the levers of liberal power over here (I don’t know European political history well enough to know when it happened over there, but it did), and the ‘don’t play with scissors’ crowd became the vanguard of leftist thought.

Me, I’m a leftist; how are -- government-sponsored health care, support for unions, a higher minimum wage, stronger environmental laws, a biiig gas tax, support for same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, strong public schools, support for a woman’s right to choose – as credentials? I do think we need to temper those with the understanding that Stalinist command-and-control aren’t always the best way to get there, and that the new information technologies and the social and management structures enabled by those technologies ought to change the tactics we use to get from here to there. And most of all, I think that we need to design these in a way that encourages responsibility and individual accountability.

But enough serious stuff; I’ve led a life with just too damn much fun; my sexual history would make Dawn blush; vodka, hell - I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the pharmacopoeia; I’ve seen U2 at the Roxy, Nureyev at the SF Opera House, the Beatles at the Bowl; dated centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; been married to two great women; held my sons when they were born, and spent their first night with them sleeping on my chest; driven away from my oldest son as he moved into his own home (but still took him to the drugstore to buy him condoms); sailed in through the Golden Gate at dawn; seen 145 on the speedometer of a motorcycle; spent the night with a dying friend; and seen the dawn just sitting and talking with the amazing friends I have made; and maybejusy maybe am lucky enough to have finally found the right woman for the rest of my life.

I’m off today to take my 15 year old to the ‘Inland Invasion’ punk show. I’ll be the 49-year old guy with glasses in the mosh pit.

So here’s the deal folks. I do think that the visible Left needs to connect with its joy, and its aggressiveness. We need leftwing Vodkapundits, and leftwing Rush Limbaughs…well, maybe not…and leftwing Instapundits, too. And we need the same things on the Right, and in the Radical Center and from the Libertarians, and the Vegitarian Unitarian Veterinarians, for that matter. I said something once on this blog a while ago:

Forgive me if this sounds sappy, but there are voices out there folks, a great chorus of different voices, and when you listen to the song we’re all singing…well, to me, the song sounds sort of like America.

The family of a terror victim in Israel has asked bloggers aroundthe world to link to her memorial page. I'm honored to comply. Go to Remembering Shiri Negari, and be reminded that while we wave our hands and have high-level discussions about policy, real people with real lives bleed and die. It will give you perspective.

I do not doubt that there is real tragedy on the Palestinian side as well; when they stop trying to get my attention by killing Shiri's, I'll be happy to talk about it.

Link thanks to Ted Barlow.

Here's a new-to-me blog with some sensible commentary on the Central Park case: Just One Minute; take a look. I'm working on a more philosophical piece, but having stayed up Really Late last night (the concert ended close to midnight and was an hour and a half away) and danced a little too hard, I'm taking some Motrin and going to bed. I wonder if the twenty-year olds have to do that...(not really)...

(Link from Instapundit.)

Ziska points out, in a comment below:

Actually, the point I was trying to make, and failed completely to make, was that you shifted gears between the Israeli individual and the Palestininan "they".

You could have commemorated a Palestinian victim without even softening your opposition to what "they" are doing, simply by commemorating (for example) commemorating the 18-year-old woman who was recently killed by thei'm Palestinian Authority because her uncle (who was also lilled) had implicated her in Israeli intelligence work. Or you could have commemorated apolitical Palestinians who die because of the curfew.

So what we got from you was a humane comment about real people with real lives (Israeli) followed immediately by the same old objectifying talk about "they" (the Palestinians).

William Burton hits another brilliant post out of the park. he expresses, in one post, the process that took me months to understand and realize; that while I didn't like the Israeli policies, they never, ever, in any way, justified the current spate of suicide bombings.

Zika reminds me that the people on both sides are human, and they are. But some of them haven't been acting that way. He also reminds me of the campaign of the Tamil Tigers, who also used suicide bombers...including those who assassinated an Indian P.M.

I'll do some more research, but I'll bet that the prime targets of the Tamils weren't pizza parlors, but military bases and military and political figures.

Different game, Ziska...guerilla war, not terrorism.

The good news is that the Palestinian 'moderate middle' I looked for appears to be appearing. I'm sure it's hard to give Sharon credit for anything, but it looks like something is working.

I still can't believe my dad can even log onto the internet, let alone have a friggin site......

He's losing faith in the whole blogging thing, so go visit him and leave some intelligent comments.

I’ve been working on a post on the whole ‘wilding’ thing, and it just keeps on coming out badly. Maybe it’s just that I am friends with too many cops, and see the damage done to them – and to their ability to be what we want them to be – by the overt hostility coded in these articles. I want to write something thoughtful and evenhanded and my emotions keep getting in the way.

Here’s the objective point: First, there is error in any system, and our system of justice is no different. Some of the error is caused by bias, some by laziness, some by unavoidable chance, all of it is tragic. Every system of justice has the same problems, and has had them for as long as there have been systems of justice…or human systems of any kind. What is unique about ours is the very faith in its perfectability…in the attainability of a justice beyond that given through personal relationships, connections, clout, or bribery. On one hand this faith is misplaced…the reality is that we are nowhere close to there.

But on the other…on the other…the goal speaks to virtually everyone in our society. The shining, Platonic, unattainable ideal of perfect justice is one that we do believe in, and fight for, and the genius of our system is that it lets us do it, and harnesses our desire for it, and does so in the name of progress toward the unattainable perfection. It speaks to us, and we act on it.

I think that’s great, and that’s what I spoke to when I gave my opinion on this case.

I think that sets our system of justice apart from any other that I have read about.

I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for.

And what I don’t see in these rounds of endless criticism is a real belief in making the systems better; what I see is a wholesale rejection of the systems…the brutal cops, corrupt prosecutors, the enforcers of the intolerable status quo…that protect the middle-class critics, who seldom acknowledge the benefit of the protection they receive.

See, I believe that there are Really Bad People out there…and that there are many of us who given the right circumstance can be really Bad. The police and the folks in the criminal justice system deal with it every day, at its very bad worst.

We need them. It’s a crappy job done for little money and less respect. It has its own satisfactions, and the good cops I know live for them…for the times they can save someone, the times they can “hook up” a bad guy, the times they can bring some justice and order to an unjust and chaotic world.

I know the “choose” the job, but as a consumer of their services, I’ll tell you that we all have a vested interest in seeing them do as good a job as possible.

Some, very few of them are corrupt in meaningful ways (not talking about free donuts); some are racist, some cruel. But fewer today than ten years ago, and fewer still than fifty years ago.

Some of my employees do a bad job, too. Sometimes my sons do bad things. But I find that a blanket condemnation is seldom a good way to get good performance out of them; and if you want to deepen the “us v. them” chasm, the kind of criticism I’ve seen levied at the NYC folks seems like a pretty good shovel.

So I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to set out the logical social critique of the case and the arguments; I’ll work on it and try to do better.

I’ve talked endlessly about the need for a ‘moderate’ Palestinian politics to step forward in order to have any chance of meaningful peace, and my belief that there was a substantial number of people living on the West Bank and in Gaza that weren’t sold on the "Palestine from the river to the sea or Death" meme.

There have been some encouraging signs here and here. These are not conclusive, nor answers, but they are steps in what smells like a right direction.

Commenter Mostapha Sabet pointed this out:

Something that bothered me is how a lot of people sort of blew off the Fatah announcement. Saying things like, "Oh, well the Pals don't consider settlers civilians" or "They only said they would stop attacks on civilians not all targets" without recognizing that this may be one small step in the right direction, but it's a huge step in the quest for peace. Now there is a somewhat major group (and growing in relative strength as IDF wipes up Hamas) that might actually prove to be a voice of reason. Let's hope it sticks.

Aram Rubyan pointed out in a comment that I was wrong to apologize, inferring that humanizing the Palestinians was the wrong way to go.

I disagree. I think that Israel is right to use force to defend itself, and as long as the Palestinian leadership persists in propagating their evil “River To The Sea” fantasy, that defense will be fierce. And the people on the sharp end of the spear will doubtless have feelings and attitudes about their opponents which are not humane and charitable and warm.

Which is why it is important for the rest of us to do so. Because of our distance we can both fiercely defend Israel, as I have done – as far as words can go – and humanize and sympathize with the individual Palestinians who are trapped by bad leaders, evil allies, and damaged culture.

Someday, this fight will be over. All fights are.

This sure looks like Israeli terrorism. There are evil fools on both sides, it appears (actually, this has been true for years).

(via Jeff Cooper).

So I’m tied up in arguments over the police, the definition of terrorism, the progress of peace in Palestine, and I can’t articulate my ideas and my head just hurts. I usually take this as a good sign, one that means that the purpose of this blog – forcing me to think through and clearly articulate my thoughts and opinions – is being met.

(thanks by the way to everyone who is tossing rocks into the soup)

But right now I can’t write about them worth a damn.

Then, scanning the blogs, I read Dawn’s prayer to become a better parent, and there’s something I can start to talk about.

I love being a dad, even when one of my kids gives me shit online. Somehow especially then…

I think I’m a pretty good Dad, although time will tell. I know that I work harder at it than I ever have at anything in my entire life, and that it gives me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done in my life.

It’s also true that it’s different – and I think harder – for moms. It may be coincidence, but both of my marriages started to splinter about the time the first child were born, and while I certainly have to carry my share of the weight for that, I can also say that I saw the women I’d married…smart, tough, professional, independent women…crack under the burden. Not only the burden of physically bearing children and tending them when they are small and helpless…I was up nights, too, and we were lucky enough to have household help…but the burden of conflicting expectations and conflicting images of who they ought to be and what they ought to hold important.

But those are issues for them, and their blogs, if they ever choose to have one.

For me, becoming a parent has been so incredibly liberating, because it has taken me out of myself.

The best story I can tell is about a ski trip we took with the boys and two childless good friends ... they had the ‘first chair up, last chair up’ attitude we’d always had when we skied together.

But now we had the boys…ages six and four…and the reality was that we were going to move on what I called ‘kid time’…we were going to get it done, but on the boys' pace. By the end of the trip, we were so frustrated with our friends, and they with us, that violence felt like a real possibility. And I felt like I had to make a choice, and I did...I chose to move on 'kid time'. And learning about ‘kid time’, and the ability to still get them where I want them to go while accepting that the path we take may not exactly be the one I planned on, is the best lesson I could have received.

This means that I’ve always dealt with my sons as ‘people’ even when I recognized that when young, they didn’t have the capacity to be truly independent. I called this ‘peas or carrots’; they always had choices at dinnertime…I just determined what the choices were…peas or carrots? And they were always willing to stand up and tell me what they wanted…while I determined if they got it or not.

I have close friends who have raised their children along the other paths…where the children were browbeaten and given no say; and where the children basically ran the house. In both cases, both the parents and kids seem to be coming out broken.

It’s damn hard. You get called away just as you’re getting ready to go to the important meeting, or there is a knock at the bedroom door at the worst possible breathing-hard moment. Their shoes come untied – again – as you are late getting them to school.

And for me, somehow, the burden always lifts just as it becomes unbearable. I find another bit of patience when I thought I was done. I turn and apologize after saying something that I wish I hadn’t said, and the anger lifts. And the road ahead becomes that much less steep when I do. And that ability...the ability to reach a little further,to be a little better...is the gift my sons have given to me.

We’re not done yet…one is away at school, one in high school, and one in first grade…but I’m proud as hell of them, and hopeful for all of our futures.

Hang tough, Dawn. It’s all worth it.

Frequent commenter Ziska has been drilling me on the issue of ‘terrorism” as opposed to “legitimate warfare”. He has drawn several parallels to wars of national liberation, and our discussion has moved from Algeria to Eire, and from India to Sri Lanka.

Others have joined him in criticizing the distinction I make, which seems very clear to me….but obviously not to them.

So I thought I’d take a stab at a broad discussion of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” uses for force, and what I perceive to be the tragic, if moral, consequences of legitimate warfare versus the equally tragic and immoral consequences of terrorism.

First, and foremost, let me dwell on the tragedies involved. Innocent people die, are maimed and wounded, have their lives shattered irrecoverably. Whether they are killed by a stray Allied bomb in WWII, a cannon shell in a besieged city in one of the sieges of the 30 Years War, a Palestinian bomb in Tel Aviv, or an Israeli tank shell in Gaza. Some starve because the crops have been ruined or irrigation systems destroyed or livestock killed; some die from treatable diseases because hospitals have no power or are inaccessible. Each of these tragic stories represents an individual noncombatant who did not deserve to die.

But the reality of human existence