THE DOGS AND WAR

All right. Back on track now. I've been dealing with a sick dog; Sidney (after Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, if any inquiring minds want to know) had a bad back and needed emergency surgery to carve some excess mineralization off of his vertebrae. Garn and gnarly that is, to be sure. Not to mention pricey. So I've been predisposed. If you've ever seen a beagle with 18 staples along his spine, you'd know what I mean.

Still have time to viddy David Hackworth and Charles Krauthammer on bubblevision, however. Krauthammer I've had problems with in the past, but he's been stellar on the war. He immediately tagged it for what it is (can we say "was" yet?) a conflict between modern secularity and medieval theocracy. I used to refer to him as Charles Katzenjammer when I was drinking. Not anymore. By the way, he's the last famous opinion maker I've seen in person in DC. He was just behind me in line when I saw Branaugh's "Hamlet" a few years back. (I don't get out enough, evidently.)

Hackworth isn't so exemplary. He keeps saying that the problem with the press coverage of the war is that none of them have served in the military; yet in the next breath, he saying that the all-volunteer force that just blasted al-Qaeda back to allah is the best we've ever had. So in other words, there's no grounds for any civilian to criticize the military unless they've served, yet the military's performance wouldn't have been quite so astonishing if they'd had a bunch of, say, Ashleigh Banfields or Aaron Browns on the roster.

Much has been made of the media's ineptitude in covering the war, with pansied louts like Robert Fisk used as examples of how unfit our Fifth Estate is to do anything other than read Noam Chomsky and cower in fear until they're rescued by the Fire Department. Our military involvement, however -- and, evidently, part of the reason it's been so effective -- has been subtle. Special Ops, behind the scenes stuff. This hasn't been (thankfully) Pelileu-type stuff, with Robert Sherrod cataloguing almost unbelievable carnage. It's been efficient, clinical, and quicker than anyone dared hope. So there's been precious little opportunity for the press to report with dramatic flair. If they've been a day late and a dollar short in their coverage, I think that's a function of how we are conducting the war.

Since everything is always better when it has willing participants, I think that the Afghan campaign so far puts one of the old warhorse arguments for the draft -- that it serves an important purpose in acting as a kind of social leveler, and that US will never have respect for the military until half of the populace has a common point of reference in their service -- to rest. Plenty of people who never served in the military (like me, although I did work for the military for several years, and loved the travel, especially when the Senior Chief would say at 2:30 that work was over and that it was time to start tossing 95-cent vodka tonics at the officer's club) still can appreciate it and the job it does (and not just the cheap booze, but that always helps.) And I doubt that my personal participation in the war so far would have, as they say on the balance sheet, "added value." I'm a lousy shot anyway.

No institution should get a pass, and that includes the military. There's no truth to the idea that you can only value something, or fairly judge something, if you have personal experience with it. For example, representative democracy: we entrust the election of government leaders to a populace who by and large has no experience either in elected office or in the professions -- such as law -- that feeds it. Yet no one questions that. Same with the military. Hackworth and his lilting demurrals suggests condemnation of any civilian criticism of the military, and that's very dangerous turf to revisit. That's part of the reason why we got into the morass of Vietnam. It's plain foolishness, and dangerous, to think that criticism of the military can only come from those who've served in the military.

MEDIA STAR?

I've only seen bits and pieces of the OBL tape, but what I'm immediately struck by is how ... ordinary and unimpressive this guy is. Bear with me a second; I'm not doing what that German artist did after he said the WTC going down was the greatest work of art ever. No one takes a back seat to me in fantasizing how to torture Osama Bin Laden so that he'd start calling me Allah. I while away my spare time thinking, like Lear did of Goneril and Regan, to have at OBL with flaming spits ....

You don't need to know Arabic, or really even need to read the translation, to make it clear what we've known all along: that this prick deserves a cell right next to Pol Pot and Ted Bundy in the seventh level of hell (and this coming from an agnostic).Inveterate analyst that I am, however, I'm trying to ascertain what it is about OBL that makes him so "charismatic." That's what the experts say, anyway.

I don't get that, OBL's "charisma." But I do know something about bores; Lord knows I've been accused of being one often enough. And this guy strikes me as being, when you strip away all the millions and all the religious fervor and all the hate and all the cruelty, a ghastly bore. When I look at him in the tape, and divorce the image that's loomed so large in all our minds for the past few months from what I actually see on the tape -- in other words, if I watch the tape as if he's some total stranger regaling a bunch of other total strangers about something I know nothing about in a language I don't know a word of --- what I'm left with is a totally unimpressive, not to mention unintimidating, slug. This isn't just cheap "let's have at the bastard of the day" commentary, either. But it's the only orderly comment I can bring to bear on this piece of videotape. Everything else in this is astonishingly alien. For instance, there are no conventional points of reference. When I sit around with a bunch of guys, we don't act like that. We drink and smoke and gesticulate with relish. Like the invaluable blogger Ken Layne says, what a boring party OBL is presiding over in this tape. There's no booze, cigars, dames; just some rancid egotist holding court. It's like he's making some kind of lame sales pitch; you take away the mufti, he could almost be selling Tupperware. (Remember, I'm not talking about what is said, I'm just discussing the visual.) He's not even lusty in his evil. And the morons around him! Nodding their heads like those wind-up plastic ducks you give to people as gag gifts on Cadillac Day.

People compare OBL to Hitler. I think the more apt comparison, after viewing the tape, is to Himmler, the dirtbag chicken farmer who went from being a nullity to overseeing a killing machine almost without precedent. Hitler, if you've ever seen his speeches, he does arrest the attention, and he probably would even if he wasn't Hitler, but was just some raving lunatic who just escaped from the pencil factory. Because, you see, Hitler was a raving lunatic, and you remember raving lunatics. Not fondly, perhaps, but they do stick in the mind. With Hitler, it's the fascination of the abomination, as Conrad said. It's the bugging eyes, the melodramatic slashing of the hands. The voice, here modulated, there stentorian. There's a kind of warped charisma there. Not so with with Himmler. Mild-mannered, a total nonentity. Wire-framed glasses over squinty eyes. There's just the abomination, no fascination.

Same with OBL. A nonentity. Like Marlon Brando said about Lee J. Cobb in On The Waterfront, "you take away your heaters and your pistoleros and your nothing." Well, OBL is really nothing. (Johnny Friendly is actually far more memorable.) He's not some 10 foot tall super terrorist who can't be stopped. He's some gawky-looking Saudi rich boy with lascivious lips and limp wrists and, quite probably, Marfan's Syndrome which would kill him off in a couple of years if we or the Afghanis don't get to him first. Yeah, he did horrible things; so did rats during the Black Plague. Hannah Arnedt also said it well, when she observed another cold-blooded nonentity, Adolf Eichmann, in the dock after the Israelis spirited him out of South America: the banality of evil. Perfect word that -- banal -- to describe OBL.

We' re gonna get the bastard and hang him proper. I'll go out on a limb and say that the head of Osama will make us all a good Christmas present. (I know, I know, not keeping in the spirit of the season. Oh well.) I expect that, in 50 or 100 years or so, after a decent and appropriate interval has passed, there's going to be a wildly successful movie or a play called "The Producers, Part II" about OBL in which he, the ghastly al-Qaeda and the goofy Talibanners, and everything they stand for and believe in, will be mocked and mocked and mocked and mocked, to the delight of a secular, modern, Western audience who, after having a good laugh at this moron's expense, will go out and have a good dinner, and then go home and get drunk and have good sex. He'll be remembered all right, but only as an object of scorn. A cheap hoodlum.

Saladin this prick ain't.

YOU SAY TOMATO AND I SAY TOMATOE

"Those damn Left and Right Coasters, I told you they were no good." So Andrew Sullivan, who's usually got all kinds of rewarding insights, is still sputtering about those fifth columnists who inhabit our coastal cities and calumniate with relish all things American, between sips of Chardonnay and morsels of Brie. John Walker is from Marin County, and John Spann from small-town Alabama. Ergo, Marin County, bad; small-town Alabama, good. Here's his recent dispatch on the matter --

"You may well have read the astonishing piece in the New York Times today about the divergent paths of John Walker and John Spann. The thing that stood out most starkly is the blue-red split. In fact, both are almost absurd stereotypes of each part of America. Here’s Spann’s background: “Mr. Spann grew up foursquare in a four-stoplight Alabama town. Life in Winfield revolved around family, church, duty and high school football, and Mike Spann embraced them all. He took apples to his teacher, played soldier at recess and prayed on Sunday with his family at the Church of Christ.” You couldn’t make that up. Then here’s Walker: “Encouraged by his divorcing parents to seek his own spiritual path, he found himself by rejecting teenage culture in the name of Islam. He sold off his hip-hop records, immersed himself in the Koran and started wearing a long white robe.” One is from Alabama; the other is from Marin County, California. One is a national hero, the first American casualty at the hands of the enemy. The other is the enemy. Does it get any starker than that?"

One of your heroes, Andrew, (and one of mine as well), George Orwell, captured this kind of attitude perfectly in Animal Farm. When the sheep would bleat out "four legs good, two legs bad" any time a poor creature dared to challenge the directives of the pigs, it wasn't just Orwell satirizing authoritarian government squelching dissent. It was his riff on how these did it: by fabricating cheapskate generalizations such as the one you keep insisting on between the brattish "blue" decadents of the coasts and the "red" heartland worthies. (Or maybe it's the reds on the coast -- after all, commies and all that, you know -- and the blues in the heartland; I forget which. It's one of those dyslexic things.)

I do know this: a sure sign of someone who's never lived in the heartland is someone who keeps making it sound like the repository of all virtue. Well, it ain't, just as the cities aren't all sin and America-bashers. Come on up here to my street in Upper Northwest DC, Andy, and see how every house on our street has a flag out in front of it or in the window.

And another thing; it's a sign of your parochialism, possibly, that you carve up the U.S. into the red coast/blue everywhere else pattern. Try telling a Yankee in rural Maine that they aren't really any different than a Cajun in Louisiana or a Plainsman in North Dakota, and then take one great big step back for your self-preservation. You'll get, at the very least, an earful, I promise you.

Give this blue-red thing a rest, pal. You're better than this.

There has been a great deal of silly carping against the Bushies regarding their prosecution of the war, and much of the condemnation directed at the Administration has been infantile, if not irresponsible. But this article from the San Francisco Chronicle is, as they might still say out in the Bay Area, right on.

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Anyone who isn't a feckless creep or a Western Civilization-hating flagellant should be happy with how the war's gone so far, and every time I see William Cohen equivocating about this or that act's repercussions on the "coalition," I'm damn glad that it's Rummy at the helm and Cheney in the crow's nest. But it's getting a little bit past the time, I believe, to give this entire Administration an exegetical pass on the culture issue, given the kind of stunts it's been pulling over the past few months. It is not pitching logic or fairness over the side of the boat (to keep the nautical theme going) to observe, like this article does, that even as we are fighting an enemy notorious for its medievalism and fascist fundamentalism, the Bush Administration, and in particular that loon John Ashcroft, has been acting as much as ever as errand boy to the Christian Right's domestic agenda.

Consequently, it's not reckless, unseemly, or even particularly gratuitous for the author to lump the likes of our Attorney General in with the Taliban. There's no statute of limitations that I know of against using such a rhetorical smackdown. The Administration's record since 911 on issues such as therapeutic cloning and physician-assisted suicide is a blatant cave to its Christian Right base, and it is all the more revolting since it's an assertion of the kind of intrusive federalism the Bushies claim to so detest.

The Administration's effort at preemptive ethical bankrupting of cloning research is not only an evisceration of its less-government ethic, but also, as Michael Lind and others have noted, an almost-unprecedented and mortifying attempt at using Federal fiat to criminalize scientific research. The Department of Justice, which you'd think would have more important priorities now, is nevertheless committed itself to identifying and punishing physicians who prescribe drugs to the terminally ill at their request. I'd rather these agents be cracking down on those al-Qaeda cells which everyone thinks are still lurking in suburban duplexes across the nation.

A bit about physician-assisted suicide. I believe that one of the most unassailable individual rights of all is to alleviate pain and manage one's own life, and that death is after all a part of life. The fact that this right, which increasingly the modern citizen wants, is under attack by the Justice Department at this time I find personally insulting. It is a bit much for me to accept that someone in great physical pain, with no hope of recovery, cannot exercise their right to end their tormented existence in a clean fashion because someone else thinks their personal deity wouldn't approve of it.

The issue here is the intersection of the expansion of individual freedoms, which is the fundamental genius and strength of our culture and which is expedited more quickly than ever by technological innovation, with taboos which are no longer either necessary or justifiable. With physician-assisted suicide and therapeutic cloning, as it was with open homosexuality and in vitro fertilization and, before that, with the emancipation of women, it is the religious fundamentalist fighting the rear-guard action against these things' widespread acceptance in society. I think it was Frazer's The Golden Bough which noted that all our taboos have a historical basis and necessity to them; the injunction against suicide, however, is surely less valid to the survival of our society now than it was in the distant past. And let me nip this one in the bud; I'm not advising suicide here. I sat on a suicide hotline, for Chrissakes', talked several people out of it (believe it or not), and consider that one of the finest things I've ever done or will do.

Perhaps the taboo against suicide was necessary in the past, but as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The point is, a lot of taboos have been unwound as civilization and its mores changed (a process which most of us, I'd think, would approve of), and many things that were verboten aren't now because the reasons they were unthinkable then don't exist now. The reason why murder is taboo then, and it is now, is fundamentally because it denies something to someone else. Suicide was taboo in the distant past because communities were frail and everybody was needed. Later societies, however, didn't need every single person in order to survive, and in fact many societies considered suicide a noble end; we all know the story of Socrates. The fact that we no longer ostracize the families of those who commit suicide (and haven't for a good while) illustrates that the taboo against it is expiring. Therefore, it follows that, now that the pharmaceutical technology is available, someone should have as much right to end their own life in the manner they wish, including to contract with a physician who is willing to prescribe and administer a lethal dose of drugs, as they do to make other choices, such as to get married or have children or even to support John Ashcroft.

Most of the "arguments" against physician-assisted suicide -- that physicians would be violating their Hippocratic Oaths, that it would lead to (or reinforce) a "culture of death," that it would lead down the "slippery slope" to mandatory "mercy killings" -- are more or less obscurantist nonsense, especially given how the law has been working so far in Oregon, where there have been actually many fewer suicides than even the measure's advocates anticipated. In particular, the slippery slope argument (which is also dragged out in the cloning debate) is patently absurd and the reddest of herrings; an individual exercising the right to end their own life is not going to lead to a state-sponsored bureaucracy authorizing killing anyone who's got Parkinson's disease. To make such a ludicrous leap requires conflating individual rights with government authority, and someone who does that obviously understands neither. The slippery slope, in fact, will probably end up going in the opposite direction; doctors who are afraid of being charged with murder will be even more reluctant than they are now to prescribe adequate pain medication to the terminally ill, and anyone who's had the misfortune to have a close family member die a lingering death (as I have) knows many doctors are already loathe to prescribe the adequate doses to relieve (and not just "manage" -- screw that!) pain.

None of this, evidently, matters to the Administration. It hearkens instead to the truncated views of Burke Balch, medical ethics director of the National Right to Life Committee, who says that drugs "should be used to cure and to relieve pain, not to kill." This is also nonsense (but then, what would you expect from the Director of Medical Ethics?) and, worse, insulting. "Killing" is what the terrorists of 911 did; a doctor giving medications to a consenting, dying patient in intense pain and with no hope of recovery isn't killing, unless the verb "to kill" is to lose its essential meaning. (And I thought it was conservatives who were always worried that the language of right and wrong was being fatally diluted by our morally relativistic society.) Physician-assisted suicide is arguably a compassionate act, and in any event it is no business of the Federal government to outlaw it.

In doing the bidding of their religious-conservative masters, the Bush Administration is using the blunderbuss of Federal law enforcement to criminalize issues no honest conservative could possibly think the government has any business prohibiting. (This doesn't mean that government wouldn't have a say in regulating these practices; grounding them in a legal framework, in fact, would help ensure there weren't the kind of abuses the opponents always bring up.) This kind of stuff guts any claim the administration has to representing "states' rights," physician-assisted suicide, after all, has been approved by Oregon voters twice, and is very popular with the voters there. The Bush Administration pursuing the Christian Right's cultural agenda often makes a mockery of its claim to represent individual freedom; for the Administration to be devoting time and resources to the fundie wish list at this time in our nation's history is outrageous.

Vermin watch: The scuttlebutt is that Johnny Walker Black (named for the color of his Taliban-issue turban which he so proudly wore as a fellow traveler of theocratic totalitarianism) was a CIA plant. Methinks there are too many devotees of Robert Ludlum covering this war. And if Walker really was a CIA plant, then good God, what more proof could you want that we need to replace the CIA with an entirely new intelligence organization.

Meanwhile, George Will, who never misses an opportunity to irritate, seems to have demonstrated some uncharacteristic tender-heartedness when it came to old J.W. Regarding our modern-day Lippmann's performance on This Week with the Has-Beens, Will was evidently cutting Walker more of a break than he did, say, Holden Caulfield:

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I keep meaning to demolish Will's little jeremiad against The Catcher in the Rye; I'm saving that task for a day when I'm in a really foul mood, and not just being an off-the-shelf curmudgeon. Will should keep to Cal Ripken-worship and nattering about "Federalism." I'd imagine that old Holden, were he alive, wouldn't have pulled a John Walker and gone off to join the Taliban, and that, being a good New Yorker, he would have been mighty pissed about the WTC. I'd rather be around a whole swarm of "self-indulgent" adolescents than spend two minutes with one middle-aged scold.

The brouhaha over fellow traveler John Walker is gathering stream and, unsurprisingly, some loony columnist is characterizing the miserable bastard as some kind of American archetype, or hero, or victim, or as anything other than what he is, which is a traitor:

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This kind of stuff shouldn't really outrage any more. Obviously, this war has shown us that there are certain fraternities of belivers in this country where the fundamental expression of common sense -- the desire for self-preservation -- is totally negated by their near-monomanical need to strike the dissenter's pose. 911 was, first and foremost, an attack on our society, our freedoms, on the very aspects of our society that progressives have always claimed to like. To try to understand/reason with/explain/sympathize with the Attas of the world is much more than inexcusable, it's suicidal. The first people to go under the knife if religious theocrats like the Taliban took over would be the secular left. (And, yeah, I consider al-Qaeda and the Taliban two sheets on the same roll of toilet tissue.)

Most secular leftists, of course, realize the danger these cretins pose and are as keen on striking back as anyone else; you'd never know this from reading, say, the Weekly Standard, but it's the truth. There are those odd nuts, nevertheless, lurking in Berkeley and Ann Arbor and, for all I know, Waco and Winnemucca, who actually think up tripe like this twisted justification of Walker's activities; they do this because they only feel comfortable when tweaking the consensus. And the larger that consensus is, and the greater the preponderance of opinion which is set against them, the better these "critical thinkers" like it.

Dissent, to these people, has taken on the character of an aesthetic; it is the tradition -- the pose -- of dissent itself, rather than the actual opinions, that drive these people to stake out the kind of idiotic positions they do. But dissent should be rational, thought out, and, like many valuable things, it loses its puissance if it's used too much. To mangle an old bromide, the person who dissents from everything, dissents from nothing.

The article self-righteously states, "The Bay Area is also a place that encourages critical thinking about the U. S. role in the world. That may have played a part in (Walker's) vulnerability to the Taliban's extreme propaganda." The author of this piece really should be pitied for his flabby reasoning, and those who harbor such muddled ideas can't be taken too seriously. If "critical thinking" about U.S. policy is based upon geographical location, then that "critical thinking" isn't thinking at all, much less critical; it's only peer pressure, and clearly refutes the claim made by any such leftists that they are "unorthodox."

Real critical thinking has nothing to do with aligning with the character of the surrounding community. (If anything, it's the reverse; when I lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, a noted lefty enclave, for instance, I found myself becoming an almost obsessive captialist, but that's another post for another time.)

To turn their own weapon against them, a deconstruction of the above San Francisco Chronicle quote would read, "Certain loudmouths in the Bay Area mandate excoriation of the United States, no matter what it does, and Walker should be held up as an icon of freethinking." Part of the reason these people seem to turn up so much in the news is that they make great copy. There's nothing like reading some apologist for John Walker linking his decision to go fight on the side of mass murderers to a "spiritual odyssey" or a "cultural sensitivity" or some other nonsense. It gets my hackles up almost as much as an appearance by William Bennett on my TV screen.

But then you read this sentence -- " With a slightly different turn of events, Walker might have become the idealistic doctor he once talked about, in order to help the poor in developing countries. Then we would have been celebrating his achievements, instead of wondering what went wrong." -- and you realize the cause of trying to understand these people really is hopeless. I have a good deal of sympathy for those who say that a twitch of a mountain goat's nerve can lead to a landslide, and I find chaos theory (or what I can understand of it) fascinating stuff, but this is a bit much. Going off to fight with a bunch of religious, medieval fanatics is something more than a "slightly different turn of events" than, say, going to medical school.

As far as Walker is concerned, his picture should replace Benedict Arnold's when "traitor" is mentioned in the school books. There are, to be fair, certain circumstances regarding Arnold that mitigate somewhat against his historical reputation as the most villianous of all traitors.

Arnold, after all, earned his stripes in the Revolutionary War as a hero of the American resistance prior to his defection. Arnold started out as a fervent supporter of the revolutionary cause. He participated in the key capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775. He then led his men in one of the most heroic chapters in American military history, on an arduous march through the Maine wilderness to Quebec City, the capitol of British Canada. His starving troops, outnumbered two to one by their British opponent, nonetheless attacked the position and, although defeated, inspired the budding revolutionists with their courage.

Arnold himself exhibited great personal fearlessness on several occasions during the Revolutionary War: at Ticonderoga, Quebec, and elsewhere. He was also ambitious and vain. Passed over for promotions and driven to financial distress, Arnold sold the revolutionists out rather basely at West Point and went down in the books as the quintessential blackguard. An argument could be made, however, that Arnold's treason was mitigated somewhat by the excellent service he had given to the Revolution prior to his perfidy.

Anyway, the point is that John Walker, pampered issue of the American middle class who went to fight on the side of an enemy whose sole animating principle is not to defeat an American army but to kill American civilians en masse, doesn't derserve one iota of sympathy, and should be summarily discarded like the garbage he is. I'm not all that keen on the administration's military tribunal idea, but I figure Johnny boy would be a good test of it. Unlike with Arnold (or that matter Ezra Pound, who at least wrote some interesting poetry), there are no mitigating circumstances with this punk. And the conditions of his case are so extreme that these should choke off all extenuation.

Matt Welch, whose warblog has become a mandatory stop every time I take a spin on the Inet Skyway, has a neat riff about George Harrison's death, and how the hagiologic excess of the media coverage about Maharishi George nurturing the spirit didn't quite square with the reality of Tory George whoring in the Hollywood Hills:

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Georgie was a bit of a money grubber, and that's bully with me. Give me griping about taxes any day over endless palaver about the soul. I'll sing along with "Taxman", and you can have your "Something in the Way She Moves" (or whatever it was called.) After all, "god" spelled backward is "dog", but "mammon" is practically a palindrome. So which one do you think is more eternal?

BTW, I wonder if Harrison wrote off his operating expenses when he arranged the Concert for Bangladesh?

Now that we've iced the Taliban and gutted al-Qaeda, to the evident satisfaction of the Afghanis (and even to some Europeans and postmodernists, possibly), the next bums to deep-six really ought to be Iran's ruling, dyspeptic theocrats.

Ever since the war began, there's been a marked increase in the restlessness among the Iranian people, particularly among the two-thirds of them who are 30 and under and want to enjoy the pleasures of youth rather than listening to rancid clerics berate them about its evils. Soccer games have turned into protests against cultural restrictions against discos, and even though the Shiite behavior police have been working overtime busting chops like the vilest of the Brownshirts ever did, the ghost of that madman Khomeni must be quivering in the light of the modernity which increasing numbers of Persians want shined more brightly yet on their country. The latest is a call for Uncle Sam to pay a military visit:

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Whenever I read a news report that notes that a people have been "cowed by 20 years of repression," I figure it's only a matter of time before the oppressors are shown the door. The activity in the streets of Terahan has a clear resonance to what went on in Prague and Budapest in 1989.

Like the article says, however, the demonstrators are becoming disillusioned, and the window might be closing fast. Nothing is inevitable; the reason why the Velvet Revolutions proceeded as they did was that Gorbachev saw these as a way to extricate his dying Soviet empire from its Eastern European franchaise. There's no guarantee Ayatollah Khamenei and his ilk will go so gently.

We must not allow that spark to die. We owe the Samanehs and Pirouzes our support -- militarily if necessary -- so that they can get on with enjoying their lives, and not just living them. By siding with the angels of secularity in Iran, we will, for the first time in our 50 years of meddling there, be making the correct choice.

With a grateful Afghanistan and a modern Iran on our side, both freed from religious theocracies, we will not have to obsess over coalitions that are irrelevant anyway. We'll then be free to call into account on our own terms the region's other retrograde regimes, whether Bathist and nationalist Iraq or fundamentalist, Wahibist Saudi Arabia; regimes which might not be quite as easy to crack open as the Taliban were.

In the flush of our success, the essential fact of this war -- that it is a clash between a modern, secular society and a medievalist theocratic totalitarianism -- seems in danger of whitewash. Our enemies are animated by the certainty that comes with the religious fundamentalist who are charged by their god; a certainty which we have often seen on display domestically by our homegrown Christian fundies. That's probably why there's been so much ratiocination recently by so many neocons in this country to blame the terrorist attacks, which are invariably receding just a bit into memory, on something other than religious extremism.

But any attempt to render the events of 911 as caused by anything other than the toxin of Islamic religious barbarism is an insult to the victims of 911 and a dangerous emendation of the situation we face. Iraq and Saddam loom large on the Mideast stage, but Saddam is first and foremost interested in his own self-preservation; we can no longer tolerate his regime in the long run, but he should not be our next priority because he does not really represent the essence of the threat we, and the secular West, face. Iran is the geopolitical lynchpin in that area, and we should do what we can to secure it next.

This is a test.

Wait a minute. This isn't radio, it's Cyber World, so typing "this is a test" is, if not inappropriate, entirely lacking in imagination. I plead guilty -- with, like you'd say when fighting a speeding ticket, an explanation.

Typing "this is a test" belies my grounding in the technology of the past. I've read about the pioneers of radio who'd say "this is a test" to determine if they were being heard. Think of old recordings of Edward R. Murrow reporting on rooftops about the London Blitz, trying to get the signal back to the States, of Orson Wells sending the country into a panic with his Halloween broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." The very tentativeness of the voice, the scratchiness of the broadcast, lending even greater mystery and gravitas to what came next. Thus, the canonization of "this is a test" as the mantra granting the speaker access to the electronic forum, and a call to attention to the listener. Pay attention, dammit!

I grew up in a time when hearing "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System" still stirred up the lurking fear of the Nuclear End. "This is a test" always had it's downside -- what would you do if it wasn't? -- and that gave it authority. So it's not unreasonable of me to have started blogging with "this is a test," because I have encoded within me some antiquated manifestations of an era when "information" and "technology" were never mentioned in the same sentence. Even though "this is a test" most definitely loses something in the translation from audio to computer screen.

In due regard of Cyber World's impact on society, then, it seems that it should have its own abracadabra-like phrase which would announce the arrival of another cybertrician to the online party, and that it shouldn't have to borrow one from the radio tradition. So, let's see. "Four score and seven years ago" is too pompous; "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day" too literary, "here I am" vaguely plainitive, "you lookin' at me?" too confrontational, "strap on your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride" too acidic, "this blog will be about all the good things in the world" too cloying, "I'm going to bitch and moan here" too off-putting, and "in expectation of the report of working group B here are today's actionable items" far too stuffy and reminiscent of the nonsense I'm often called upon to parse in my day job as a functionary of Your Federal Bureaucracy.

"Citizen Rant," my sobriquet which may change at any time, is "Citizen J" all grown up. "Citizen J" was this author's sometime-handle in the last millennium, when he wrote articles for a none-too-successful e-newsletter on personal finance. This "effort," as they say in the bureaucracy, had the unfortunate luck to germinate during the summer of 2000, just when the stock market began its meltdown. The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble, and the subsequent expiration of the enthusiams of the investor class, laid the newsletter low. But Citizen J endured, lurking online and sending out spasmodic bulletins to contingency organizations and indulgent acquaintances, waiting, in other words, for a mission, like Kurtz. The wait ended September 11th. Among all the other changes that occured to me on that day, my personal opinions seemed more important to me, and it seemed more important that I should at least advertise them. One of my lifelong ... well, crusades, has been against religious fundamentalists; I've known my share (of the Christian variety) personally, found them to be often unpleasant and reliably boring. Don't paint with a broad brush ... yeah, yeah, but exposure at a tender and early age can leave its mark forever. Anyway, I'd had a bad feeling about the Islamic variety for a long time prior to the 11th, and in particular I'd paid attention to this Bin Laden bastard. If I'd forseen the stock market similarly, I'd be a reasonably wealthy man today.

I predict that, sometime in the future, ascribing to that horrible day of world-historical significance some mote of intensely personal implication, as I've just done, will be considered a conceit, a charade, a cliche. Perhaps that is already happening; I'm already reading criticisms from those who are critical of individuals who want to air and arbitrate in a public forum their ideas and, more importantly, emotions about those atrocities. Such criticism is unseemly and antithetical to the Ur-concept of this nation, the First Amendment. The rise of the blogger, of unexpurgated individual opinions not subsumed into a moldy consensus or synthesized into blandness by conglomerate media, can only reinforce the importance of the First Amendment as not only desirable, but necessary to a healthy society.

Now, having written such a overwrought paean, I'm reminded of the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane as a young man makes a big deal about his statement of principles to his buddy Jedidiah (Joseph Cotton), who's less than impressed, but more than amused, by his friend's earnestness. Then the camera switches back to Orson Welles, and we see his face in this curious contortion, and the camera shot is held for just one moment too long. The enthusiasm in his features suddenly seems to be something darker, and you're not sure whether Kane is laughing at himself and at his tyro's zeal, or whether it's the first signs of the monomania which eventually destroys him.