April 22, 2013

It's Time to Move On (Again)



April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18993#sthash.3x6GMdHH.dpuf
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18993#sthash.3x6GMdHH.dpuf
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18993#sthash.3x6GMdHH.dpufAApril is the cruellest month, breeding 
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull rocks with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land."

As I understand matters, we are not to be intimidated anymore by terrorists.  Speaking for all of us, President Obama has declared on national television that we are no longer afraid.  The incomparable (and often incomprehensible) Tom Friedman of the New York Times concurs: 

"And while we are at it [not being afraid], let’s schedule another Boston Marathon as soon as possible. Cave dwelling is for terrorists. Americans? We run in the open on our streets — men and women, young and old, new immigrants and foreigners, in shorts not armor, with abandon and never fear, eyes always on the prize, never on all those “suspicious” bundles on the curb. In today’s world, sometimes we pay for that quintessentially American naïveté, but the benefits — living in an open society — always outweigh the costs."

Just a quick memo to Tom: I'm virtually certain that organizing the Boston Marathon is a year-round activity, and as soon as the current one is finished, plans begin for next year.  In fact, let me look that up for you.  Okay, that wasn't too tough.  Here you go:  http://216.235.243.43/races/boston-marathon.aspx The Boston Marathon is organized and run by the Boston Athletic Association, and plans are underway for the 2014 running of this annual event.  My idea would be to wait until the third Monday in April of next year, just like always, although in theory I'm sure a second Boston Marathon could be organized in a couple of weeks if you think it's necessary to demonstrate our steely resolve. 

As for our obliviousness to "suspicious bundles," I'm pretty sure, if memory serves, that at airports and stadiums, aboard public transit, on train platforms, signs are everywhere now that urge everyone to report "suspicious bundles," and the U.S. Post Office has definite policies on how big a package can be jammed in the corner mailbox, just as another example.  We're also told that if we "see something" we should "say something."  My local CVS Pharmacy has half an aisle devoted to "travel size" everything: eye drops, tooth paste, anything else that can be reduced to four ounces. 

Also, our nonchalance in the face of danger would probably come as something of a surprise to the families of about one million Iraqi dead, or the 5 million or so displaced refugees in that country.  We should also mention the 5,000 or so American dead, and the wounded, maimed, amputated, blinded and insane soldiers in numbers probably at least ten times that amount who served the country by fighting essentially symbolic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter war to protect us from weapons that did not exist, and the former so that Osama bin Laden, who was living in Pakistan, could not use Afghanistan as a base of operations, that is, if he felt like going back to Afghanistan.

Not that I consider myself uncommonly courageous (not at all, in fact), but I was pretty much with the new program as of September 12, 2001.  As I recall, it was actually the country's leadership (Bush & Cheney) who hyped the bejesus out of the threat of terrorists, as they warned us of mushroom clouds and, in Bush's words, "an enemy who lerks."  Every time we felt like relaxing, they would stir up hysteria again by warning us of the crazed legions of Muslim terrists who spent all day dreaming up ways to mess with us, envious, as they were, of our freedom.  A freedom which Tom Friedman now openly urges us to flaunt, as we run around in our underwear with our eye on the prize, although he notes that among those running around on the streets were "foreigners and new immigrants," which was certainly the case in Boston, and that just shows you what can happen when you're trying to write some pulpy paean to American fearlessness before the news cycle has gone all the way around.  You know?

Well, I got that wrong, too.  It turns out the culprits were a couple of Chechen whack-jobs that we more or less imported for reasons best known...to nobody, but if you survey the pre-history to the entry of the 9-11 hijackers into the United States (available in the Report of the 9-11 Commission), you will see that there is nothing particularly new about this circumstance.  The Underwear Bomber, after all, was on Janet Napolitano's no-fly list, but he was all but given access to the Red Carpet Lounge in the course of flying to the United States.  We freely admitted the 9-11 hijackers into the country even when their visas were expired, then housed them and trained them to fly our planes into our buildings.

I guess what I'm saying, Tom, is that you don't really have to worry about Americans getting all uptight and vigilant and shit, and by next week this thing will have blown completely over. Who's got the time to focus on the Boston massacre?  Next week, or maybe the week after that, someone will open up on a crowd with one of the freely-available automatic weapons infesting the countryside, probably someone in withdrawal from a neurotransmitter drug, and then we can obsess about that for a couple of "Hardball" sessions, and then move on again, eye on the prize, with abandon and never fear, although at a certain point you have to wonder whether all this obliviousness is a mark of moral fiber or a symptom of complete societal madness.





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