Month: September 2001
The art of living in interesting times
“Now we have a real crisis. For the time being, there is no real left and right in America, just the loud and the quiet.”
These self-proclaimed ‘anthems’ exploit tragedy and people’s emotions
“En route, I heard not one, but two original mixes of songs (Jewel’s ‘Hands’ and Neil Diamond’s ‘Coming to America’) peppered with sound bites of both President Bush’s crisis address to the country, and the terrified reactions of spectators watching the planes crash into the towers, and their subsequent collapse. ‘Produced by our very own…
Nothing marks the spot where young Gavrilo Princip started the First World War
“When the war began, a Serb girl and her family left Sarajevo on one of the flights evacuating people out of the city. She left her Muslim boyfriend behind. But she couldn’t stand to be away from him, so she came back to Sarajevo to see him. At another bridge that then was on the…
At my son’s private school boys are not allowed to play Power Rangers
“My five year old saw the live coverage of the second plane crashing into the WTC. He immediately went and found his Spiderman t-shirt and told me that he and Gavin would not be at school when I picked them up because they were going with the Power Rangers to save the world. He urgently…
Well, they said they need clothes, didn’t they?
“Early yesterday morning, just as dawn was breaking over the scene of wreckage and death, a group of firefighters on a break from the grim routine of searching the rubble was seen in the Brooks Brothers store in 1 Liberty Plaza, joking and trying on coats and top hats.”
He often drove a bulldozer across the precipitous mountain peaks
“Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1955, the youngest of some twenty surviving sons of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest and most prominent families. He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He…
A guerrilla war is not technology versus peasantry, but endurance versus will
“During the war, draft-age Soviet youth increasingly tried to avoid the draft and Afghanistan duty. Large bribes were paid to exempt or safeguard the children of the privileged. A disproportionate number of youth from factories and collective farms served in Afghanistan. The conscript’s morale was not great when he was drafted. At the training centers,…
Flagism is not the way to ‘draw people happy again’
“The TV is showing people singing together on the streets of New York. Blacks, whites, Arabs, Chinese, people of all nationalities and races holding hands singing. Some of the most powerful images yet. Who would have believed you a week ago if you would say ‘New Yorkers will hold hands in the streets and sing…
We retreated by stages from daily life, and now we advance again towards it
“Life slowly returns to normal in New York, with a million caveats. I’m at work but not concentrating well. I was supposed to fly to Chicago tomorrow, and I could still get there, technically, perhaps by car or train, but the logistics are overwhelming. Subways and bridges and tunnels and buildings open and close at…
Taliban plead for mercy to the miserable in a land of nothing
“Killing our leaders will not help our people any. There is no factory in Afghanistan that is worth the price of a single missile fired at us. It will simply increase the mistrust between the people in the region and the United States.”