Dope

My post today was going to address the reparations issue, following on the heels of the Durban, South Africa conference on racism. But I'm sick today - I have a sore throat, and I've just finished watching, for the 100th time, the World Trade Tower collapse, and I'm so sick of that.

When a disaster like this strikes - although, actually, there hasn't been a disaster like this in the US - the public personalities who float ectoplasmically across our tv screens suddenly come into relief, some for good, some for ill. I'd have to say that Peter Jennings is the most palatable of tv anchors. Dan Rather was at least more subdued than his usually ebullient, dyslexic self. Brokaw was pretty bad - he kept remarking that prominent people were probably killed in the planes that went down. Well, death is a nasty equalizer.

Fox TV went psychotic, so that I couldn't really watch it. The immediate question was where had they rounded up so many multi-fold fat white guys with barbecue on their chins to shout, in unison, let's bomb the bejesus out of em. Unfortunately, there is nobody yet to bomb. This is a punch in the dark.

There's an article in Slate -

Who Done It? by Timothy Noah - which (despite the title's inappropriate Yoga Berra grammar) is a reminder that we have no idea that Osman Ladin was responsible for this. Noah's point is that it could be home grown fascists. Nobody yet has fingered the Columbians, yet Ochoa was just extradited to the US - and the last time a Columbian coco billionaire was threatened with extradition, a terrific bombing campaign broke out in Bogota. The oddity is that there was no warning. It does make you think - what is the FBI doing? We have a huge national police force that chases stolen cars, has the dopiest psychological profiling bureau ever, catches bank robbers, and seems to have no clue that an organization is about to coordinate the hijacking of four separate planes and coordinate crashes of those planes into populated areas.
There isn't really anybody to retaliate against, yet, which gave the tv talking heads, and their endless analyses of Osmana bin Ladin, a rather odd cast. I have tried to imagine what it means that apparently four planes were hijacked with knives, if what the networks report is true. Knives. I am suprised that knives were the weapon of choice, especially if these were men trained by or associated with Ladin. Another thing I find funny is the reports of the telephone calls. There were numerous telephone callers among the passengers, and yet none of them described the men hijacking the plane the way your average white american - like me - would. None, that is, said these arab guys, or these foreign guys - they simply refered to men.
Another impression - and these impressions seem particularly unworthy when I think that as many as ten thousand people might have died in the World Trade Center today - is that Giuliani, a man I have, otherwise, no tolerance for, is a great mayor in an emergency. The contrast between his tv persona and Bush's was quite striking.
I've gone through a lot of weblogs. I recommend this one:


There are some others too, which I will put up later.