On the last morning of free America

A repost from the old CWRU blog, so that maybe I’ll find it next year. This was written on the 5th anniversary.

I got to work just before 8:30, as usual, opened up the library, got my email and dealt with it, opened Netscape, around 9…and there on the home page was something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Shrug. Tragedies happen all the time, and I don’t pay much attention to them. A few people die, life goes on. Some drunk or crazy private pilot, probably. I didn’t click on the headline; I did whatever I’d opened the browser for.

I don’t recall who called first, whether it was my girlfriend (now wife) Rusty, or Mary Burns from Special Collections (who I think had the day off). But they both let me know that this was not your typical tragedy, that something very big was happening. And I wanted to know more. So I hit the Net, just like every other person in every other office in America. And I learned that broadband avails not when every news server in the country is being bombarded. Web sites took hours to load, or so it seemed. So I tried broadcast. No TV in Kulas (we had a straight video monitor for tapes and DVDs). We had a room full of receivers, but none had antennas, and none brought in anything but static. Mary and Rusty kept calling, people coming through to the music department were pumped for details and provided with what I had. I’m a librarian, damnit, let me do my job of transmitting information. Work keeps me sane. Yes, I’ll show you how to find Rite of Spring, if you really care today. Nobody did.

German class at 11:30, was it? And that bastard Benseler dropped the lesson plan and had us talking about it, in English yet. Nein. Fick das. Ich kann die Wörter für dies auf Englisch kaum finden. Wie schwerer konnte es auf Deutsch sein? Lass uns über Flugzeuge und grosse Gebaüde reden, ja, selbst über das Turkenproblem (and I note that my old German-English dictionary has no entries for Moslems or Islam). Es klingt ferner, wie Dresden oder Auschwitz oder der Heimatssicherheitsdienst (Ach! Das war nicht in der Vergangenheit, sondern in der Zukunft.)

Shortly thereafter, the University sent us all home. And the RTA made us leave the Rapid at E. 34th, to get on busses to sit on Public Square forever so that, in that hypothetical moment when the plane hit the Terminal Tower, only half of it would fall on our heads. And finally home, to the deafening silence of an nearby airport with no planes (and the stark terror three days later when I heard the first one fly over), to the TV that I couldn’t watch and couldn’t turn off.

In days after, I checked friends in NYC. The composer Jeff Harrington saw the smoke from his office. My old love Beth Marker was working as a toxicologist for NYC, and was stressed. As I later learned, baritone Stephen Poulos, a schoolmate at University of Michigan (though I didn’t know him) had decided there was more money in computers than in singing, and was in one of the towers.

It hasn’t happened again. Does this mean the government has done a good job? I haven’t flown since then either, since I don’t care to be treated as a criminal. On 9/10/01, we weren’t discussing NAIS, or Real ID, or a hundred other assaults on liberty only tangentially connected to radicals hot for their 72 Virginians. It was the day that we as a culture learned how to fear, and we ran towards anything that would promise safety. Judged by that, it was the most successful terrorist act in history.

My colleague Mano Singham sees all the commemoration as false sentimentality. Not here. I don’t, can’t in any real sense mourn 3000 people I never knew. The only difference between them and any other random sample of people is that they died earlier and more unpleasantly. I mourn the free country I grew up in, freedom that has been going downhill for years but which was given a good kick downward 5 years ago today.

Ay yi yi yislands

There’s a certain amount of chortling in the dextrosphere over Obama confusing the Malvinas with the Maldives. It’s kind of understandable; the Maldives are much close to Sweet Home Indonesia than the collection of rocks in the South Atlantic. And if one is going to object to the exploitation of the various gaffes of President Bush, it is only fair not to exploit the gaffes of President Fifty-seven States.  The real gaffe was in not saying “the so-called Islas Malvinas” or “as Argentina calls them, the Malvinas”.  But that would have implied a commitment to Do Something, when Britain no longer can and Obama never would. And it might have been confusing to the Argentines, who seem to have a problem of late with the concept that Words Have Meanings. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, their Presidentess, said upon stealing her third private company, “I’m the head of state, not a thug”, which in the face of such evidence to the contrary is mightily redolent of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook”. (We will for the moment ignore the argument that “head of state” and “thug” are synonyms.). Sine $18B or so is worth more in the modern world than 3140 humans and some possible oil, I suspect we’ll be seeing a warmup act for the coming Reunion of China, at which point the President will affirm that the Island of Thailand must remain independent.

If Man won’t rule justly, God must

Some interesting ideas from Sarah Chayes:

The Enlightenment (historians and philosophers, please forgive the simplification) was the moment when certain Western countries dethroned God from his role directly ordering human affairs. A set of rules was substituted, derived from human reason and thus subject to amendment and expansion as conditions evolved or as the understanding of who is a full human being in the eyes of the law — and could therefore benefit from these protections — expanded. One of the key elements of these rule-based systems has been legal recourse against perceived abuse of power.

But if such a rule-based system is captured by a criminal network, thus injecting an intolerable degree of the arbitrary into the award of opportunity or benefit, then citizens are denied fair recourse. To whom, then, should they turn for redress of legitimate grievances? In many cases — in Afghanistan as well as in Nigeria or Uzbekistan — they have turned back to their interpretation of God and his laws, obliterating more than 200 years of political history.

We’ve got crony capitalism now, a government becoming more corrupt by the day, where the lead-off item in a morning White House briefing is a car dealership in Missouri, where agents buy guns and give them to Mexican drug cartels. And the people supporting this gang are deathly afraid of the possibility of some Chritianist oppression (like, you know, the 1950s). Could it be that they are creating their own bogeyman, by not cleaning up their own government?

Black

Here’s an idiot in the UK who thinks that people’s association of black with bad is an arbitrary construct which can be reprogrammed by lying to students, dressing witches in pink, and getting rid of white paper.

We learn very early on that black is bad, and nature is the teacher.  The night is black, and you can’t see. You trip, fall, and hurt yourself…even if your name is Tyrell Williams. And in the night there are creatures who can see in the dark better than we can…creatures who are hungry. Our ancestors built fires to make light to chase them away…and the black coals the next morning frequently burned them.

There is no intrinsic reason why our more melanin-resplendent brethren (most of whom aren’t “black”)  should be related to the darkness of the night…unless they behave like the beasts of the night.

Carla Rees and the savages of England, and their defenders.

I’m a member of a society (well, more of a mailing list, as I haven’t actively promoted my music through them) of tonal composers. These are folks who, by and large, like to complain that their music has been blacklisted because it isn’t atonal, and blame the Academy for all their problems (notwithstanding that many of us have no problem getting performances, and that most music being performed is tonal to one degree or another). When they are not complaining about not getting unmerited performances, they complain about not getting unmerited money from the filthy rich, or about others not doing so.

Well, a piece was posted about the recent misfortunes of contemporary flutist Carla Rees. It’s sad, absolutely. My boss lost a Baroque lute in a car theft, and it took him 4 years to replace it. Ron Andrico of Mignarda lost 3 lutes in a carjacking, but managed to recover them. But it’s not intrinsically more sad than some working-class person who last their family photos.

Immediately the tut-tutting began, and I lost it:

Unfortunately, this is what happens when people are poorly educated (ethics isn’t taught in most schools and is neglected by parents), and social and economic problems are allowed to fester.

No, this is what happens when the state refuses to perform its one unarguable duty of protecting property, when the intelligentia argues that religion doesn’t matter, and when artists make excuses for barbarians. Y’all own this one, far as I’m concerned.

Immediately, I was accused of being “partisan”

There are many elements that brought this about, but I don’t think blaming the ‘state’ for not protecting property in the face of widespread rioting is going to achieve anything.

And there was conflation of the property crime of the original Tea Party with the current Tea Party:

> Sorry, but today’s Tea Party movement just doesn’t get it. When a society and its government ignore your misery and kick you down, they, too, must acknowledge their own role in bringing about violent upheaval. The violence is indefensible–but it is explainable.
>
No, it’s you and Anthony who don’t get it. People have been miserable and kicked throughout human history. Why didn’t they burn their villages down?

You want to make this partisan. I didn’t. I figured that we could agree that a government at a minimum exists to keep order. I wasn’t addressing any functions beyond that. If we don’t agree that government exists to govern, then why does it exist at all? Note that Britain is currently ruled by what passes for the moderate Right over there, and they couldn’t even decide to deploy water cannon until well into the crisis. With somebody like the craven Home Secretary Theresa May in charge, who needs Labour?

There are three options for citizens: fear God, fear Man, or fear nobody. To fear nobody is to get what we’ve just had. To fear Man is either to have a police state, or a fully-armed populace…and without the fear of God, what makes that populace or that state anything other than an armed counter-mob? To fear God(s) is the foundation of Western civilization, because people control themselves, therefore needing a minimum of external control. “Teaching ethics” won’t do it, because any ethical system that can be rationally derived can be rationalized away. Pride in doing what’s right will only extend so far. In Britain, you had government unwilling to act, a citizenry unable to act (having been disarmed), and a nation badly in need of reconversion…so there is no reason not to do whatever you want to. When (not if) sharia law comes to Britain, the citizenry will dance in the streets, because at least those streets will be safe.

When I said, “You own this”, I meant it, because you’ve been making excuses for the inexcusable. You lament Carla Rees, because her values are yours. But she played music for toffs; if the poor dears were oppressed, didn’t she get what she deserved? What about other less-privileged victims? Aren’t family photographs irreplaceable, even more so that Rees’ instruments and scores? … What is ironic is that the members of a society which believes that there are objective canons of beauty in music refuse to recognize that there are objectively-correct moral beliefs.

BTW, I don’t think that the Boston Tea Party was morally right, and it was short-term counterproductive… I’ve seen nothing equivalent from the modern Tea Party.

Show me the pictures!

I woke up this morning and was as shocked as anyone by the news about the late Mr. bin Ladin.  It was particularly ironic that it was announced on Doubting Thomas Sunday. Now, I’m not saying that I need to put my fingers in the bullet holes before I’ll believe. But as a general rule, if this government says, “The sky is blue”, I’m going to look up.  And we’d already had one major revelation this week, the birth certificate. So, “We got Osama” was not particularly evidentiary.  Matters were complicated by the fact that the military, out of deference to the Muslims, made sure he was buried at sea before 24 hrs were up. Now, I can see the wisdom of “make him go away completely”; you don’t want a shrine. And there’s certainly a limit to how far you want to rub their noses in it.  If we were 19th-c Americans, his body would be plasticized and he’d be on tour with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, who would doubtless charge a silver quarter per throw to pelt him with raw sausage. But we’re not that, for better or worse. The man does merit a Christian burial (note: not a Muslim one necessarily; we’re not obligated to perform another religion’s rituals)

Now, I don’t have any grand conspiracy theory about how the government just made it up.  That might explain parts of the hinky dance we’ve been doing with Pakistan. But really, it’s not credible that the government would make up something that could be so easily falsified, though Al Qaeda couldn’t falsify it without a major cover-blow. Still, We the People have no independent confirmation that what happened,  happened. Asking for that doesn’t make us “deathers” or any other kind of loon; it’s just asking for what we got for the Nazis and the Iraqi Baathists

We’ve had pics of Osama’s sugar shack, complete with blood stains. But nothing of the O-man himself, except for a 2 year old Photoshop.  Now it turns out that, as you would expect, the government has pictures. They are hesitant to release them because, well, they aren’t pretty; they involve brains leaking out. And if they pretty them up for public consumtion like they did those of the Saddam boys, they’ll get the same criticism.

So they’re gross? ‘Scuse me, but I remember one whole day when all you could see on the TV was people diving out of burning towers; are they grosser than that? I think that every one of us who lived through that day have a right to see Osama in his gore (particularly if we knew somebody who didn’t live through that day). Yeah, maybe the creeps will put the pics on their shrines. But they’ll do that anyway; if they see Bloody Obama instead of vigorous young Obama, it might make them think twice about the wages of jihad. I’m willing to keep the kiddies out of it; save them for the 11 o’clock news if you must. But we adults have a right to know he is really and truly gone.

Sicko banned in Cuba

Isn’t this a pretty little WikiLeak? Almost makes the rest of Assange’s bullshit worthwhile:

…when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”

I wonder how the Left will wish that one away.

WikiLeaks odds n ends

If Bradley Manning is found guilty, I think he should hang. That said, if these reports are correct, he is being treated in a way that would constitute abuse if done to an animal.

Meanwhile, Assange attempts massive principle FAIL, but the judge decides that the virtues of openness extend to his home address.

The four martyrs of Lubeck

Three priests and a Lutheran minister were beheaded for treason Nov. 10, 1943. Their blood ran together, in the ultimate ecumenical gesture. This summer, the priests will be beatified, and the minister honored.

That honor isn’t quite enough for some Lutherans, who think that Catholics should beatify non-Catholics. But Lutherans don’t do saints. They could, but they don’t. Maybe the fuss is really about their own collaboration with the Nazis:

Rev. Stellbrink, 49 when he died, has been described as a prickly character who initially was an eager supporter of the Nazi party. The World War I veteran soon became disillusioned with Nazism, especially its anti-clericalism, and began to criticize it. He was expelled from the party in 1937 for refusing to denounce his friendship with Jews.

In 1941, he met Father Prassek at a funeral and increasingly began speaking against the Nazis by building a friendship with the younger priest, who had resolutely opposed Hitler’s regime.

Rev. Stellbrink was the first Protestant cleric to be executed in Germany. Unlike his Catholic friends, he received no support from his church, which rehabilitated him only 50 years later, noting its “pain and shame” at the disgraceful treatment of the heroic pastor.

A citizen does his duty for WalmarTSA

“Anonymous said…
Last week I got coffee in Litchfield – while there I saw this suspicious looking guy, kinda fat, red jacket and pants with a white beard. He even waved at me. I headed north to the new Wally World where, lo and behold, there’s this same dude, following me down the aisle. WTF? Being a good subject, I immediately found a store management type (I know this because she was watching two others work) and told her about this guy; I even pointed him out. She started laughing. I, of course, was NOT smiling. As far as I know she is still laughing. At least she was when I walked away from her. Nonetheless, I felt better for having turned in a very suspicious looking character.
December 9, 2010 6:50 AM”

This IS no laughing matter. This guy routinely violates US airspace and so far has not only not been shot down, but has never even been through TSA screening…I mean, think of what could be hidden in that belly! Further, he claims to have detailed information on who has been bad and good, and their deepest desires. Not even Julian Assange can claim that. Further, by distributing unearned and undeserved largesse, he’s impersonating a government official (though I don’t know what’s with the red clothes…you’d think he’d lose weight, shave, black his face and get fake elephant ears to go with his impersonation, if he really wanted to be convincing.). Oh yeah, and pandering…he’s got to be a pimp with a get-up like that, and all that talk of “ho ho ho”. He’s not a citizen, but I’ll bet there’s a cell at Gitmo with his name on it.

UPDATE: Vanderbeogh has a suggestion for helping Walmart and the TSA.