WHEN DID BONO BECOME AN AMERICAN? “If having it in your heart is all it takes then I am a baseball player. My point is, his statement is not about America but rather about Bono. I guess my problem is not with some Irish singer so much as it is with what he represents. I really don’t need a weekend of people preening about how tragic 9/11 was, as if no one else has those thoughts or feelings. Let the people who lived through it tell their stories.”
Archive for 2011
September 11, 2011
AT AMAZON, an outlet sale on Cellphones and Accessories.
BARACK OBAMA: The Obsolete ‘Post Office President.’
SALENA ZITO: Main Street Quietly Revolts. “They don’t care what we think. They care about what they want us to think.”
Plus this: “Waiting in an airport for a much-delayed flight recently, I watched a military unit pass through. Spontaneous applause erupted, honest gratitude from average citizens. That is the America that Tom Link knows, not the America he sees in the national news.”
EVERYBODY’S ANGRY, to judge from my email, about Paul Krugman’s typo-burdened 9/11 screed. Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay — hell, forget the “feet” part, the clay goes at least waist-high — and it seems likely he’ll have even less reason to like the coming decade than the last, and he’ll certainly have even less influence than he’s had. Thus, he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied. No surprise there. But no importance, either. You’ll see more and worse from Krugman and his ilk as the left nationally undergoes the kind of crackup it’s already experiencing in Wisconsin. They thought Barack Obama was going to bring back the glory days of liberal hegemony in politics, but it turned out he was their Ghost Dance, their Bear Shirt, a mystically believed-in totem that lacked the power to reverse their onrushing decline, no matter what the shamans claimed.
Plus, a comment: “I’m not ashamed. If Dr. Krugman, and the circles he moves in, are ashamed then they’ve left us. 9/11 didn’t become a wedge issue because we left them.”
And, cruelly: “Should we be ashamed of bombing the crap out of Libya, too? Inquiring minds want to know.”
And crueler still:
Te atrocity was a unifying issue, Bush’s way to deal with te atrocity garnered over 70% approval. Krugman and his ilk drove a wedge and claimed Bush, after eight whole months in office should have prevented te atrocity, Bush’s calmness and continued reading My Pet Goat showed he was not presidential, not fit for office.
10 whole years later, Krugman would prefer some hysterics to highlight the “gutsy” call to kill the guy hidden in a cave (metaphorically), and diverts attention away from the doubledip recession. The double dip caused mostly by the One listening to Krugman and his ilk. After three years, it’s still Bush’s fault for a lousy economy.
Indeed. (Will “te atrocity” become a lasting Krugman meme?) Anyway, don’t be angry. Just be glad Krugman illustrated exactly what lies behind the have-you-no-decency schtick he sometimes affects. From the comments: “Krugman’s comments are an indication of the nature of one of the problems we face; which is, a lot of people in positions to influence our country really don’t like our country. Krugman (by the way, did you know he is a former ‘Enron adviser’?) is among those who earn well, live well and eat well but really wish they could live among a better sort of people.”
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Dear Prof. Reynolds,
I really began to follow your blog on Sept 11, when most other websites were down due to traffic. Looking back ten years, I think it would be true to say that I have never experienced a historical event that has been more whitewashed, and this is almost frightening. There’s the obvious airbrushing of the falling victims, any body-parts or blood, the people cheering in the Middle East, etc. But there’s also the invention of a “we were all united and then Bush ruined it” idea. This is nonsense. The professional and academic left immediately started with “the chickens have come home to roost,” “it’s our fault for supporting Israel, etc.”
On Sept 11, just after the second tower fell, I was walking across campus with one of my colleagues. This was at the point when we thought there were 50,000 people dead. Her very first comment was, and I am not making this up or exaggerating it: “I am most worried about our muslim students.” Most worried. Not a word for the dead, not a word for the suffering, not a word for students who might have lost loved ones, but a concern verging on panic about the utterly idiotic idea that a bunch of students on a small liberal arts campus in New England were about to persecute the four muslim students in their midst. Political ideology trumped human decency, and elaborate fantasies of deranged redneck muslim-haters were concocted out of thin air. People were demonstrating on my campus against a war in Afghanistan even before Bush issued the ultimatum: there was never support for that war among the professional or academic left.
Another thing that has been airbrushed is that the country (and especially the political class) didn’t immediately support Bush. His handling of the crisis seemed inept at the very beginning, and I know that I had a sinking feeling that he would do exactly what had been done with every other attack: stern words, sanctions, some UN investigating committee which would take years. And the left wasn’t exactly giving Bush a break. Mary McGrory (in a column that I think has been memory-holed for its amazing stupidity) actually proposed that Bush make Gore co-president, because we needed a “national unity” government. It wasn’t until Bush said “and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” that I could start to hope that maybe something could be done. The country wanted action taken: most of the political class really did not, but they were pushed along by the public.
Maybe I’m naive, but I never thought I’d see the history of an event that billions of people saw be re-written in less than a decade. My Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the future.
[if you use this, please don’t use my name, but if you want an identifier, maybe “A Professor at a small Liberal Arts College in New England”].
Sad that so many of my academic readers request anonymity.
JANET DALEY: 9/11: The dark day that brought out the worst in Britain. “The tragic events of 9/11 were immediately followed by a grotesque and shameful fusillade of anti-Americanism, which still resonates today. . . . Now the refrain is: America lost an opportunity to examine its role and question its assumptions. Why, in other words, couldn’t it have revelled in the kind of self-doubt and identity crisis that has become Europe’s chronic condition?”
THE ART OF Drudge Juxtaposition. “There is a reason Matt Drudge is America’s News Editor.”
A GUIDE TO DITCHING CABLE TV. I’ve been happy with the Roku Box.
EVAN COYNE MALONEY: A Video Memorial for September 11th, 2001.
RANDY BARNETT: “Saved By The Militia.”
And read Brad Todd’s “109 Minutes,” from September 16, 2001. Key bit:
Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism — the most deadly yet invented — came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective.
Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.
And in retrospect, they did it in the most American of ways. They used a credit card to rent a fancy cell phone to get information just minutes old, courtesy of the ubiquitous 24-hour news phenomenon. Then they took a vote. When the vote called for sacrifice to protect country and others, there apparently wasn’t a shortage of volunteers. Their action was swift. It was decisive. And it was effective.
United Flight 93 did not hit a building. It did not kill anyone on the ground. It did not terrorize a city, despite the best drawn plans of the world’s most innovative madmen. Why? Because it had informed Americans on board who’d had 109 minutes to come up with a counteraction.
It was obvious to Todd on September 16, 2001 that the Atta technique had become obsolete at the hands of ordinary citizens. Our government is still spending a fortune defending against it.
WE’RE SEEING A LOT OF I.P. OVERREACH: Sanctioned: P2P lawyer fined $10,000 for “staggering chutzpah.”
Judge Godbey fined Stone $10,000, which he hopes will be enough to “deter similar misconduct and adequately reflects the gravity of the circumstances.” In addition, Stone has to pay the attorney fees for EFF and Public Citizen, and must tell the court if he has settled with anyone in the Mick Haig case, and if so, for how much.
Finally, Stone has to send a copy of Judge Godbey’s order to each judge overseeing any federal or state case in which Stone currently has a hand—whether or not it has to do with file-sharing.
Those are serious penalties, but as Judge Godbey noted, “The adage ‘it is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission’ has no place in the issuance of subpoenas.”
I like that last.
LOOKING BACK. Greyhawk emails about this:
So I read this today…
GEORGE BUSH IS NOW THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD: People always say that about Presidents, of course, but usually it’s only notionally true. Now, if he wants to nuke Baghdad, there is nobody to say him nay — and damned few who would want to. That’s a danger if he goes off half-cocked, but I don’t think there’s much risk of that. But I wonder: do the people behind this assault realize what this means?
Posted 9/11/2001 12:50:25 PM by Glenn Reynolds
…and just wanted to let you know you were probably more right than you knew back then. I was on Barksdale AFB, and right about the moment you posted that thought President Bush was walking onto the flight line for the next leg of his trip – accompanied by the commander of the 8th Air Force.
We were near the end of a major exercise that day, so by coincidence the B52 fleet was loaded, the pilots were on hand, and everything was ready to go. (“What do you mean by loaded?” You might ask. “Yes,” I would reply.) ‘Sir,” the General advised the President, “give the word, we are ready to go.”
“Stand by, I’ll let you know.” He responded.
That was a moment in history like no other before or since, but I don’t believe more than a handful of people know it happened. Your “I don’t think there’s much risk of that” is exactly right (obviously) but the temptation and justification were greater than most people might have imagined. To be sure, the General’s meaning was a very sober “we’re ready if you need us” rather than an eager “let us go,” but remains a marked contrast to what I suspect most people think about when considering US military power. In short, the unthinkable is anything but unthinkable.
I knew.
SOME 9/11 THOUGHTS from Paul Rahe.
UPDATE: Prof. Jacob Howland writes:
Shortly after Sep. 11, 2001, I was asked to be part of a public “teach-in” that was held at the University of Tulsa. Paul Rahe was on the panel. I told the audience at this teach-in that our immediate challenge was to prevent further acts of terrorism against the United States. In order to do so, I said, we needed to identify the perpetrators of 9/11 and kill them. “[Our] greatest long-term challenge,” I added, was to change “the culture of hatred”—and in particular, vicious anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism—in the Muslim world. I concluded my remarks as follows:
I know that some of you may be angry with some of the things that have been said, or will be said, this evening. All I ask is that each you be willing to speak your own minds without fear of what others may think. This is not a time to conform to your neighbor’s idea of what you ought to believe and feel. Nor is it a time to ignore or to suppress unpleasant facts. It is a time for clear thinking, straight talk, and unflinching honesty.
In the discussion after my talk, a faculty colleague publicly denounced me for, as he wrongly claimed, proposing that Americans should intentionally kill innocent civilians. Another told me that he was glad the United States was attacked on Sep. 11. A third scolded me for saying things that, she claimed, would intimidate our students. A fourth condemned me, in an e-mail that was widely distributed, as a shill for evil Zionists. A fifth who attended another public lecture I delivered after 9/11 printed up, and distributed to dozens of faculty members who were not present at my lecture, a mischaracterization and ostensible rebuttal of my views. And, several other faculty colleagues simply stopped talking to me altogether.
Just thought your readers might be interested.
Jacob Howland
McFarlin Professor of Philosophy
University of Tulsa
I notice how the lefties — see, e.g., Glenn Greenwald — often first completely misrepresent your statements, then attack their own misrepresentation. I take that as an admission that they have no coherent response to my actual words, and suggest that you take it the same way. They can’t handle “clear thinking, straight talk, and unflinching honesty,” since under those circumstances they would never win an argument. As for the people who won’t speak to you, well, they’ve shown themselves to be petty, dishonorable, and entirely out of place in an academic institution. So the lack of their company should be welcome.
DISPATCHES FROM THE DRUG WAR: Woman Billed for Body Cavity Search (a Search That Discovered No Contraband).
KENNETH ANDERSON: Of 9/11 Memorials, Monuments, and the WTC.
SPENGLER: Turkey Can’t Act Rationally. “Why Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan chose the year 2038 as the point at which his country will cease to exist, I do not know, but that’s what he’s been saying in stump speeches to his home audience, as I report in my new book, How Civilizations Die. He can’t be too far off. A generation from now, Turkey will cease to exist in its present form. The ratio of Turks to Kurds today (defined by cradle tongue) is about 4:1, but Turks have 1.5 children on average, while Kurds have 4.5. In little over a generation, Kurds will comprise half the military-age population of Anatolia. After decades of civil war and 40,000 casualties, Turkey’s Kurdish problem is as vivid as ever.”
The future belongs to those who show up.
TEN YEARS ON: “It is significant, by the way, that in the wall-to-wall coverage we’ll see today, we won’t see two things: the media has assiduously avoided showing the awful video of the people who jumped from the towers, and we won’t see any video of the throngs in the Arab world dancing wildly in the streets celebrating on 9/11. Both might stir up politically incorrect sentiments.”
ANDREW FOX: The Absence of 9/11 From Science Fiction. “Do the modern day ‘taboos of science fiction’ include an extrapolation of the potential danger of radical Islamicism? Several anecdotes suggest this is so.” A lot of the science fiction world has become sadly PC and, as a consequence, uninteresting. Not all of it, happily. But tired Christian fundamentalist dystopias are far more likely to be published than Islamist dystopias, I suspect. Perhaps it’s just a function of who editors and reviewers genuinely hate and fear: Baptists, mostly.
UPDATE: Robert Ferrigno emails to say, essentially, What am I, a potted plant?
And reader Erik Fortune writes:
“When Gravity Fails” by George Alec Effinger and sequels are a series of cyberpunk novels set it a future middle-eastern setting. They’re from 1986 so they predate 9/11 by a long shot, but the setting could have come straight from Mark Steyn.
Indeed.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Wyman Cooke suggests John Ringo’s The Last Centurion.
And many, many readers point up Tom Kratman’s Caliphate.
COVERING THE IMPORTANT NEWS: Catching Up With Miss Universe.
Related: Miss Universe contestant told to wear panties. “Miss Universe officials have a message for Catalina Robayo, Colombia’s entry into Monday’s contest: Don’t forget to wear underwear. Robayo, one of 89 beauties from around the world competing to win the Donald Trump-owned contest, has been reprimanded for making appearance in tiny skirts – with no panties.”
CONGRATULATIONS TO ROGER SIMON: “A Better Life” Wins Best Picture at 2011 Alma Awards.
DOING THE MATH: Galactic Scale Energy. I’d like to be a Kardashev II civilization ASAP. For the rest, we’ll see.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “Our problem is that we are a Kardashian IV civilization.” Heh. Those are much less powerful, but more annoying.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D SEE THIS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT: Barack Obama: The Covert Commander In Chief. “It’s an interesting anomaly of Barack Obama’s presidency that this liberal Democrat, known before the 2008 election for his antiwar views, has been so comfortable running America’s secret wars. Obama’s leadership style — and the continuity of his national security policies with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush — has left friends and foes scratching their heads. What has become of the ‘change we can believe in’ style he showed as a candidate? . . . Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving ‘mission accomplished’ speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in ‘Dreams From My Father,’ you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.” Frankly, this doesn’t seem such a contradiction: His enthusiasm for deniable takedowns seems quite consistent with his approach to domestic politics.