denoting trinkets putty Egyptian opportunistic rung …

This will be a little briefer than usual, because I’m off tomorrow. (Yeah, yeah, I’ve been “off” for years now!) Nope, didn’t pull off the hat trick; but almost as good: In the Council category, our first-place vote won first……

The Council has spoken. This week’s winning council entry was Contemptible by Done With Mirrors a rather brutal (but well deserved) takedown of director Brian DePalma’s anti-American propaganda movie. On the non-council side the overwhelming winner w…

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are Contemptible by Done With Mirrors,…

To many on this side of the world, therefore, America’s dwelling—and dwelling—on its losses of two years ago appears unseemly. The firemen who gave their lives in the World Trade Center are heroes to inspire the world. And most Muslims regard the assault of a few fanatics as a blot on their religion, not a triumph. Yet America, determined not to look up from the event and to keep brandishing its wounds before the world, looks at times like an angry child who lacks the perspective of his elders. When a troublemaker tries to provoke you, even schoolboys know that you get the best of him by turning away and going about your business. Each time the U.S. revisits its sorrow, it provides Osama bin Laden with another victory and lives down to the terrorists’ caricatures of it.

The very tragedy that should have propelled America closer to the rest of the world, and made it more sympathetic to cultures that have suffered catastrophes of their own, has only pushed America deeper into itself. And at precisely the moment when it should be thinking about a global future—if nothing else, the attacks reminded us that the grievance of one place is the sorrow of every place—the U.S. is retreating into the past and a vision of “us” against “them.” America has acted in recent years as if to be on the receiving end of evil is, in itself, to be good. That being opposed to wrong is not the same thing as being right, that being a victim is not the same as being an innocent are ideas not warmly entertained of late in the land of the free.

Everyone who suffers a terrible loss grieves over it and remembers its anniversary; not to do so would seem scarcely human. And in the case of America, which has been shielded for so long from terrorism at home, the 9/11 attacks possessed a force that more weathered cultures have forgotten. But the older cultures, having extended a hand toward America at its time of need, can reasonably feel now that the U.S., in its rage, has swatted them away. And the imbalance of the world—whereby so much power and money lie with one of its youngest nations—is compounded by that deeper imbalance whereby almost every nation knows more about America than America knows about every other nation. Each reiteration of the 9/11 tragedy can make it seem as if the U.S. is stressing its losses to the exclusion of those in Bali or Bombay or East Africa; when more than 120,000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh in 1991—40 times as many casualties as on 9/11—I do not remember my neighbors in California showing much concern. —————————————–

Cicero did not say that the treasury and guardian were infalible or fool proof security - did he? Memory fades just as the wall of any treasury crumble and the guardian grow old and weak. So we need new guardians to build new defenses, and in order to achieve that we need to give them a wake up call before our memories fade, and before the terrorists give them a wake up call of dire consequences.

All the best,
Glenn B

It just takes one side to make war. A significant point about 9/11 is that THEN we noticed there was a war on and we’d better start fighting it.