Our overreaction to 9/11

Ted Koppel reminds us that we have been tricked into destroying ourselves, and wonders whether we will ever have the courage and wisdom to stop:

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams. It did not have to be this way. . . . Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.

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Stop the mobile cupcake peddlers

Just when I thought that the streets were getting safe, I spotted this ominous-looking van in front of the office building where I work: Talk about attractive nuisance! Notice the growing line of docile people above, each of them helpless to resist the temptation of the active ingredient one finds in cupcakes, C12H22O11. Check out the mountain of icing towering over the cupcake pictured on the side of the van. Talk about superstimulus! "Three dollars per cupcake," said the cheerful woman working in the back of the truck. She insisted that her cupcakes were "made with love." Maybe so, but this is a product that will make a lot of people fat. 65% of Americans are overweight as it is. These cupcake trucks, if allowed to roam freely, would probably kick that percentage up to 95%. We just can't allow that to happen, but how could one stop it? My first reaction was that these cupcake trucks should be made illegal. But then I took a deep breath and pondered the long-term situation. If we made cupcakes illegal, then people would start selling them in dark alleys, and even in the proximity of schools. And then gangs would spring up to defend their respective turfs in the cupcake street wars. Teenagers would start running cupcakes for the young adult pushers. Police would be chasing cupcake dealers from one end of the city to the other. Families would be broken up as parents were caught dealing in cake. People would be hurt. Some people would die ignominious street deaths, shot to pieces by cupcake gang members bearing AK-47s. Prisons would become crammed even more than they currently are. New social programs would need to be created to deal with the cupcake eating underclass. Some kids would see their schoolwork suffer as they abandoned their homework, their shopping malls and their Wii's and, instead, sat around and obsessed about their next hit of cupcake. The attempt to enforce new anti-cupcake laws would jack up the cost of the cupcakes, and the quality of the product would diminish--disreputable dealers would cheat customers by putting less icing on top. Innocent obese people would suffer withdrawal symptoms. Cops would increasingly crack down on peddlers, and the local news would feature pallets full of seized cupcakes that would start disappearing as soon as the hit the "safe" confines of the police evidence lockers. As much as I'd like to put a stop to this new temptation, the best way to deal with these cupcake pushers is public education. We need billboards, Internet ads and television spots informing people that cupcakes do not taste good. We need to educate people that if they see one of these vans along the street, that they need to keep looking straight forward and walk on by, paying no heed to the amoral peddler within.

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A question for President Obama

I wonder, which is a better recruitment tool for potential terrorists: the burning of a Koran or the following news items from the past month or so:

  • Civilian death toll in Afghanistan "soared" by more than 30% since 2009
  • Taliban asks for independent commission to investigate civilian deaths, insisting that they are not to blame. U.S. says they don't want to grant Taliban legitimacy by negotiating with them, stonewalls the issue.
  • 12 American soldiers on a secret "kill team" have been (allegedly) caught murdering Afghan civilians for sport. They then (allegedly) took pictures posing with the bodies, mutilated them, and kept fingers of the dead as souvenirs. They were turned in by a fellow GI, who was then beaten and told to keep his mouth shut and stop "snitching". Originally five soldiers were arrested, now seven more have been arrested as part of the cover-up and assault on the whistleblower.

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Robert A. Heinlein In Perspective

I finished reading William H. Patterson's large new biography of Robert A. Heinlein yesterday. I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I gave it a day to simmer. Frankly, I'm still not sure what to say other than I was positively impressed. Basically, Patterson achieved the remarkable goal of demythologizing the man without gutting him. I've read any number of biographies of famous (and infamous) personalities which tended either to be hagiographic (and therefore virtually useless as any kind of honest reference) or a brutal airing of personal failings in some sort of attempt to drag the subject down to "our level" and resulting in a catalogue of reasons to think ill of the person under study. (This is one reason I tend to urge people that if they like an artist's work, read it all if possible, see it all, listen to it all before finding out about them as human beings. Too often the person, depending on the book, spoils the work for many.) Patterson has done something useful for aspiring science fiction writers. (Hell, for any kind of writer as far as that goes.) Heinlein's reputation casts a long, dark shadow across the field. He is one of the pantheon of timeless Greats and in many ways the most intimidating of the lot. It is, I think, useful to know that he had just as much trouble getting started---and staying started---as any other decent writer. (Harlan Ellison has observed that the hard part is not becoming a writer but staying a writer, that anyone basically can get lucky at the beginning, but over time the work simply has to stand up for itself.) The legend has been repeated ad nauseum, how Heinlein saw an ad for a short story contest, wrote a story, then decided to send it to Astounding instead of the contest because Campbell paid better, and it sold. That story was Life Line. From there, up was the only direction Heinlein went. The reality is much more as one might expect. True, he sold that first story to Campbell and sold more, but not without rejections getting in there and Campbell making him rewrite some of the pieces and not without a lot of wrestling with reputation and deadlines. Writing is hard damn work and this book shows what Heinlein had to go through. Yes, he was better than most, but he wasn't teflon. And he had to learn, just like any of us. Reading about time spent living in a four-by-seven foot trailer on $4.00 a day while he sweated a new story makes him suddenly very human. But also very admirable. The other problem with Heinlein is that he did codifying work. There were time travel stories, generation ship stories, alien invasion stories, and so on and so forth before him, but he wrote a number of stores---all lengths---that more or less set the standard for how those stories should be done. He wrote "defining" stories, and for a long time people gauged their work and the work of others by that gold standard. One gets tired of having such a bar hanging over one's head all the time and naturally a reaction emerged over time that was as nasty as it was inevitable, casting Heinlein as the writer to work in opposition to. By the time I discovered Heinlein, during my own golden age at 11, 12, and 13, he was already being touted as "the Dean of Space Age fiction." [More . . . ]

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