What a wild day yesterday.

When we talk about our enthusiasms, it is easy to hitch ourselves to hyperstatement and lose perspective along the way. Someone who lives for the outdoors takes a river rafting trip, and comes back talking about huge rapids straight out of "Deliverance"; then someone asks about the gap-toothed mountain men, and the point of the story is lost. Another builds a shed behind his house and it becomes a grand enterprise as if he was building the house itself, or a community of them, and then someone starts asking about zoning regulations and the builder wonders whether he's breaking any of them just to build a place to store his shovels and peat moss in. Someone who loves violent weather experiences a day like Sunday and watches huge supercell thunderstorms develop and then keeps saying how unprecedented it all was. And then someone comes along and equates your excitement over severe weather with pathological tendencies, or at the very least with insensitivity. This is particularly likely to occur when that severe weather exacts the kind of toll the violent tornado in neighboring La Plata, Maryland did yesterday.

OK, I stand accused, and I'll even acknowledge the charge of crassness. But that's all I'll plead guilty to. Sunday was a wild day, and unprecedented in Maryland meteorological annals. Weather hobbyists were burning up Internet bulletin boards (and had been for the past couple of days) in anticipation of a severe weather outbreak. No apologies in this corner for thoroughly enjoying the excitement, nor for being thoroughly disappointed that the best look I got of this once-in-a-lifetime event was from the rear and 20 miles away. My "chase" of the tornado was more or less aborted before it even began. A tale for another time, one perhaps best summed up by Franklin's quip: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the battle was lost." In this case, for want of an uncongested road, for want of a fully fueled and trustworthy automobile – hell, let’s face it, for want of personal initiative at that moment -- the chase was not only lost, but didn't really start.

The tornado that hammered La Plata, a small town 25 miles southeast of Washington D.C., was a tragedy, and no amount of hand wringing about the inappropriateness of getting excited over severe weather will restore the shattered lives in Charles County or will rebuild the town. In another nod to overstatement, La Plata can be fairly described as "destroyed," even though large parts of it were undamaged, if not untouched. With rare events such as F5 tornadoes, such exaggeration is forgivable.

So are other tendencies. Like I said, from a weather hobbyist's point of view—my point of view—Sunday will be long remembered. It's my nature (no pun intended) that I remember in uncharacteristic detail the days when extreme meteorological events in my life have occurred. I remember those days with the same clarity that I remember the day I got married, or the day I got a play produced, or the day Intel cracked 80. I suppose the great mistake of my life was that I didn't go into meteorology, rather than quixotically pursuing (is there any other kind of pursuit, particularly when it fails?) a playwriting career which, like yesterday's tornado chase, ended rather abruptly and unceremoniously, and then deposited me on the sands of bureaucracy where I feebly struggle, like an overturned sand crab, to right myself.

A bad poet with a lamentable command of metaphor might well ask--well, I did ask this, that's my problem--what is the theater of the atmosphere compared to the theater of the human condition? I went interchange on that one a long time ago. The theater of the human condition is mostly farce, and a poor and deteriorating one at that, but the theater of the atmosphere is a grand and ongoing drama, and to learn more about it is to make it all the more compelling. No wonder the Greeks peopled the heavens with gods who had such human characteristics. So I went for the art, and came belatedly to the conclusion that the artists these days are scientists, since those who call themselves artists now are, more often than not, mere dogmatists who are to art what alchemy was to science; as we regress in the one, we progress in the other. From such choices as these, I suppose, are the fates of individuals cast and, when aggregated robustly enough, the destinies of civilizations determined. That is especially true if you believe in the butterfly theory of chaos, which is that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil causes a supercell tornado to ravage Maryland. All the more reason to save the Amazon, then; I want more of those butterflies flapping their wings. I want scads of them, clouds of them, to flap their wings in such numbers and with such vigor as to nudge ever increasing numbers and sizes of air parcels, laded with tropical moisture, northward to interact with the jet stream, itself energized by the quiet yet ultimately apocalyptic beating of butterfly wings from, say, Alberta.

And anyway, could differential equations have been all that hard?

Well, to business. The La Plata tornado appears now to be the strongest and most damaging in Maryland history. That the death toll is only three from an F5 tornado on the ground for 30 miles through a rapidly growing D.C. suburb, is not a miracle. It's a tribute to science and building codes and public education and good common sense. It's a tribute, also, to the survivors I heard interviewed that there was precious little of the kind of God-was-looking-out-after-me sanctimony I've so often heard from disaster survivors when they are interviewed by the avatars of bubblevision who descend on Pea Brain, Tennessee, or some such place where these kind of tornadoes usually do their worst. As if God wasn't looking out after the residents of the doublewides one cul de sac down. When people ask why I so disdain evangelicals, I usually cite this kind of thing. That's one of the reasons why I live in this area rather than in, say, Alabama, where tornadoes like this are much more frequent, or in, say Oklahoma, where they are even more frequent than that (and much easier to see, and therefore chase, to boot).

People who are above ground and who survive the effects of an F5 tornado—260 mile per hour winds—are the exception rather than the rule, no matter how well built their homes are. Those who live in Calvert County (east of LaPlata, where the same storm, perhaps the same tornado, tracked) report a great deal of damage there as well. F5 tornadoes are rare in Oklahoma (in fact, the last one in the country was the Oklahoma City tornado of May 2, 1999, which killed about 40 people and was the most damaging tornado in history); in Maryland they were, until yesterday, unheard of. It's estimated that Maryland had only experienced two F4 tornadoes (which have winds between 210-260 miles per hour, enough to flatten most homes) in the last 100 years. Even the College Park tornado of last September, which tore up the University of Maryland (and, in a little-known proof of chaos theory, led to the Terrapins’ NCAA basketball championship), was but an F3 on the Fujita Scale.

Ah, the Fujita scale. Every spring, we learn all about it, and then forget what it is until the next season's tornados level shopping centers and trailer parks. The Fujita Scale goes from F0, assigned to the weakest tornadoes that do less damage than a severe thunderstorm's winds, to F6, a theoretical level of "inconceivable" damage which, however, is never assigned (I'm reminded of the scene in "This is Spinal Tap" when the lead guitarist is asked why the levels on his amplifier go up to 11, instead of 10, and he answers, "well, they wouldn't go up to 11 then, would they?") There are probably more people now in the Washington DC metro area who can describe the Fujita scale authoritatively than there are people who can name all of the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, even though, given the war, it’s probably more important for us to know a vague something about all those unstable Islamic ‘Stans over there than it is for us to know about the nuances of the a means for measuring cyclonic (and in rare cases, anticyclonic) wind speeds as a function of observed damage. That says a lot—but not necessarily anything bad—about what sparks people’s interests.

There are some interesting things about the eponymous Ted Fujita, who taught at the University of Chicago and passed away a few years ago. Professor Fujita is a revered figure in tornado-hobbyist circles, and with very good reason. His effective yet practical protocol for ranking tornadoes revolutionized and codified an invariably subjective exercise. He introduced the concepts of tornado families and thunderstorm architecture. From his surveys of the infamous 1974 tornado Superoutbreak (always capitalized, by the way, for the same reason that "Hurricane Andrew" is), he discovered that the most intense tornadoes often have multiple vortices that spin around an axis within the general circulation of a tornado, and that these "suction" vortices, when added to the forward speed of the tornado and to tornado's own spin, create swaths of pronounced and especially phenomenal damage. These suction vortices account for the much-remarked characteristic of tornadoes for "skipping" across the ground, leveling a brick house here while leaving a tent 30 yards away standing. That actually happened in La Plata.

Anyway, Fujita survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing -- hell on earth, so to speak -- and yet had a boundless enthusiasm for both violent weather and, obviously, for his work that necessarily put him in countless situations where he observed human misery. I doubt he had much tolerance for those who would say that such fascinations with violent weather reflect a ghoulish character. Put simply, Professor Fujita loved tornadoes, he survived an atomic bombing, and I'm sure he could readily tell the difference between a fascination with the agents of the destruction and a lust for the destruction itself. (Ironically, he went almost his entire life without seeing a tornado in person.)

That love of tornadoes, and the equivalent love of tornadoes seen with many other scientists, engineers, meteorologists, and even ordinary citizens who are called upon as spotters across the nation (I'm a lapsed one myself), has saved countless lives over the years. The research of these people, as manifested in the Storm Prediction Center's warning system, in the heightened public awareness of what to do when a tornado approaches (even among citizens of Maryland, not known at least until now for its tornadoes), is directly responsible for the fact that, as of this writing, only three people have died. Or, as they say in official statements, only three fatalities have been confirmed. (There's a research issue in linguistics that perhaps the good Dr. Chomsky can pursue once he gets his America-hating out of his system; a good blog can't go on this long without bringing him into it one way or another, can it?). Three is a stunningly low total of deaths for a storm this violent, and more than answer necessary to those who would carp that excitement or appreciation of violent weather is a sign of an insensitive or warped personality. Severe weather happens, and the warped ones here are those who would use the same invective against those who get excited over tornadoes as they would use to describe suicide bombers.

The great ongoing scandal, instructive here, is with the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, which now appears to be what some have been saying all along—rife with putrid types who, literally, used the robe and the chalice and all the gaudy and consecrated trappings of that Church as a shield behind which they could practice their black arts of seduction and sodomy against children. Yet these degenerates—and they are truly degenerates, and not those consenting adults attending an S&M convention in St. Louis who were so blasted by these weedy “decency” groups always popping up in the fertile soil of American opinion—were considered morally superior and "good" and entrusted with people’s children to an astonishing degree simply because they were considered “men of God” or some other such nonsense. I’ve found that those who most unquestioningly fell for this ruse—apparently more or less codified (or at least stringently ignored) at the highest levels of the Catholic Church—are often the same people who bash those who get a kick out of the spectacle afforded by tornadoes or floods or other acts of nature. That is, when they are not bashing advocates of cloning, abortion-rights and euthanasia-rights supporters, those who prefer freedom of speech over sanctimony, and those who don’t feel it’s necessary to have the Ten Commandments posted in every public building in order to prove their virtue.

It’s funny how the two great taboos of our time—the slaughter of innocent civilians and the rape of innocent children—have been practiced on a rather consistent basis by those who are acting in the name of God. While secular agnostics and atheists, who are considered by among others Joe Lieberman to be axiomatically incapable of ethical behavior, have been … well, not doing those things.

Damn, this turned into another rant against organized religion. I suppose I'm just like Chomsky, so obsessed over one thing that I can't write about anything else without launching a tirade against monotheisms.Oh, well, as the other characters in McMurtry's great novel Lonesome Dove kept saying of the stern and haunted Texas Ranger, Woodrow Call, "someone's got to take the hard seat."

And regarding that last post, and just for the hell of it ...

Never mind.

HERE WE GO AGAIN?

A "small tourist" plane has hit the tallest skyscraper (32 stories) in Milan. It happened around noon EDT, so it's late afternoon in Italy. There are reports that an SOS was received at local air traffic control prior to impact, but there's nothing definite. There are also reports that some people on a ground saw what appeared to be a Piper Seneca which might have had smoke coming out of it circling around the downtown area prior to the incident. The Seneca is a two-engine plane with about 2200 gallons of fuel and a wingspan of about 40 feet, but it did leave a gaping hole that more or less spans the entire width of the building. Some experts are saying that the hole is too large to have been made by a plane of this relatively modest size.

There's no point, however, in automatically assuming that this isn't a terrorist attack. It might very well be an accident--the Italian authorities are saying it is an accident--but advisories against "jumping to conclusions" have been rendered, after September 11th, moot. That's the kind of world we're in; that's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. I'd argue, in fact, that it is irresponsible not to intially assume it's a terrorist attack, and then rule the possibility out subsequently, rather than the other way around. I would imagine that the identification of the pilot would solve a lot of the problem.

Some speculation. A couple of characteristics suggest that this incident could be a terrorist attack, or at least something else than a tragic accident. It's a clear bright afternoon in Milan today, so reduced visibility would not be a factor. The plane hit very close to the top of the building and dead on; from the footage of the damage footprint left behind on the side of the plane, it seems that the plane was not that large, but that it hit the building squarely, and not a glancing blow. The Pirelli skyscraper is the largest skyscraper in Milan and, from the looks of it, one of the few buildings in the city worthy of the name. If the plane was in distress, why would it hit a skyscraper; pilots, even private ones, are trained to find an open area to land their plane in if they find themselves in distress. Even in the event of a serious mechanical failure, the chances of a plane plowing directly into the only tall, standing structure in the vicinity, seem to be rather long.

If this does turn out to be a terrorist attack courtesy of Muslim fundamentalists, maybe some of those Europeans who have been so quick to find fault with the U.S. will realize that they are in this war with us whether they like it or not, that these religious fanatics don't just hate the U.S., or Israel, but they hate the Western secularism and rationalism that is our strength and the hope of mankind.

One more thing: Milan is a famously cosmopolitan city, a characteristic despised by the al-Qaeda and that ilk. So even though the Pirelli building has nothing like the symbolic cachet of the Towers, the city itself would have symbolic value.

The resurrection of Citizen Ranter is upon you. It doesn't have quite the ring that "the word of God commands you," or whatever it was that the priest yelled at the devil within Ms. Blair in "Exorcist"--a seasoned blogger, which I ain't, would have googled until they found the exact quote, but I'd rather just introduce the word "google" into the language as a verb. Watch it catch on. Nor would "the resurrection of Citizen Ranter is upon you" make a catchy refrain to a song, like, say, "the eyes of Texas are upon you" does.

The Texas reference is not accidental. There's a theme all over blogdom right now that Bush is going all flaccid on terrorism since he sent Powell over to the Mideast. Warbloggers and neocons concur in slamming Bush for acknowledging that the Palestinians, despite their lamentable choices in leaders and methods, have at least the rudiments of a case for some kind of homeland. Peacejunkies and PA apologists and others who see every issue as an exercise in dialectics and nothing else, think Bush should be plotting Sharon's downfall and think Arafat is the reincarnation of Che Guevarra (who, unlike his compatriot Prof. Castro, had the good sense to get himself killed in the 60s before the Cuban experiment in la liberation turned into statist skulldugggery). Many an outraged cry from this quarter this morning about yesterday's pro-Israel rally down on the steaming Mall. No, the Texas bit has to do with tornadoes.

We're approaching prime tornado season, and the country is overdue for an outbreak; there could be one today. Occasionally, when I've started getting excited about tornadoes and their beauty and power, I've found myself opposed by some righteously indignant type who castigates me for wanting bad things to happen to people. I respond that of course I've wanted bad things to happen to people at times in my life, and so has everyone else, and anyone who doesn't admit they haven't is lying to themselves in the most insidious manner. Then I ask them what they mean by "bad things." Do they mean atmospheric processes and fluid dynamics and temperature differentials, the absence of which would make life on this planet more or less impossible for anything larger in size than a retrovirus? "Well," they reply, with their dudgeon levels skyrocketing, "I love humanity, and that's not the same as loving tornadoes which cause people so much suffering, have you ever been in one, have you ever SUFFERED?" And I realize I'm dealing with a member of the tribe of the Righteous, who sees in every errrant act and misfortune the hand of some self-indulgent vulgarian who is certainly morally unfit and, quite probably, an imperialist as well.

OK, shoot me. The Oklahoma City tornado killed one-seventh as many people as McVeigh did, and September 11th killed more people than have been killed in all the natural disasters in this country since World War Two. Anyway, this is the latest in the year, in recorded U.S. weather history, that the country has gone without suffering a tornado-related fatality. So to all those Muslim fanatics out there who are awaiting the terrible hour when allah smites us during this Clash of Civilizations, maybe it's time to reevaluate your worldview.

But as regards the return of the Ranter, the only question is whether it will be noteworthy, notable, noisome, or (I'd bet on this one) noneventful. (Somewhere in the neocon empyrean, a crewcutted apparition is haranging about "nattering nabobs of negativism"to the thunderous applause of Freepers. Boy, has Safire come a long way.) See, if this particular Phoenix of a blog were to ascend with too much zest, my Lifetime Nonachievement Award might be revoked by the Powers and Dispositions who give out such things, and I'd have to fill that great big gap on my wall with something else, like a clock or a cheesy picture of a sunset. If I were a real American and man of accomplishment, I'd be optimistic and expect things to always get better, and for this blog to not only become a going, paying concern, but to launch issues into the zeitgeist like the Soviets launched Katyusha rockets at the Nazis, and that I'd end up on the cyberpodium with the Sullivans and Welchs and Reynolds and Postrels of the world. But since I'm just a run-of-the-mill jingoist who's greatest achievement will be that someday I will, like them, be a Dead White Male (oops, fact-check my ass regarding that last name), the ramparts of pessimism will still be ... er, manned.

I'd be in good company, though, if my Nonachievement Award were to be revoked. The Norweigians, for instance, are threatening to strip Shimon Peres of his Nobel Peas Prize. ("What's all this fuss about the Nobel Peas Prize, anyway?" the late, great Emily Letella is saying in another, higher-rent section of the afterworld.) with all the posthumous gusto their finely honed ethical angst can muster. I've got a real soft spot for Scandinavians because of Ibsen and Strindberg and saunas and blondes and the midnight sun and cross-country skiing (well, elliptical trainers that mimic cross-country skiiing), but this ... is ... sad. 'Sides, I thought it was Sharon who was the bully boy here, lumbering into the peace loving city of Jenin with his thuggish Israeli army that is just so damn good that they don't give the poor al-Aqsassassins a fighting chance, forcing them to strap Semtex onto kids too young to be in Webelos and then sending them Zion-ward. I guess our Scandinaivan ethical superiors don't bother making a difference betweeen Sharon, who is a bit of a thug (even though it's hard to fault his response) and Peres, who presided over Israel's withdrawl from Lebanon when he was P.M. (which, in retrospect, is not looking like a good idea in that it was too dovish a move and prompted Arafat and his goons to their conviction that terrorism works.) Of course, Sharon doesn't have a Peas Prize to strip him of, so therefore the Zen Masters of Morality and Propriety, who prosper in such environments as the Nobel Committee and the Catholic Church and who specialize in symbolic gestures, have decreed it is their duty to speak out against the injustice by stripping Peres of his. At least Peres will still be able to say that he pulled off Entebbe; which accomplishment would you rather have on your tombstone?

Or maybe it's this, Vidkun: that all these Zionist warmongering belligerants just look alike, hm? Points to he or she who can guess which Isben character I'm echoing here.