It has been recently been graphically and blatantly illustrated that
*some* members of this list are as enthralled to knee-jerk extremism as
is this woman, just in the opposite direction.
September 14, 2001
This is war
Barbara Olson kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers
herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell
phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United
States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI -- the plane
had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone
with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the
Pentagon.
Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist
attack. She was a patriot to the very end.
This is not to engage in the media's typical hallucinatory overstatement
about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell
phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not,
we'd be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even
people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air
travel.)
The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She
generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really
found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud
to her over breakfast.
I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really
nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren't. (And some who don't
seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful,
ebullient self. "Nice" is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the
opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason
to be secure.
Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns
aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that
could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary -- the latter being a
subject of Barbara's appropriately biting best seller, "Hell to Pay."
Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she
discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted
and Barbara really did talk politics -- and really did have breakfast
together.
It's "Ted and Barbara" just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and
Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends
were as happy they were on their wedding day. This is more than the
death of a great person and patriotic American. It's a human
amputation.
Third, since Barbara's compliment, I've been writing my columns for Ted
and Barbara. I'm always writing to someone in my head. Now I don't
know who to write to. Ted and Barbara were a good muse.
Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from
the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly
omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that
bombs were dropping in Afghanistan -- and then updated the report to
say they weren't our bombs.
They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals
directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible
include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the
annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.
We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine
with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific
attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a
study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional
resolution condemning the attack this week.
The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we
welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in
discriminatory racial or "religious" profiling.
People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines,
and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a
lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht
immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II.
Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.
"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV.
Every single time there is a terrorist attack -- or a plane crashes
because of pilot error -- Americans allow their rights to be contracted for
no purpose whatsoever.
The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about
whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen
mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen
armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously
on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a
single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)
Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport
harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous
to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We
know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and
dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only
Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed
civilians. That's war. And this is war.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:16 MDT