[CT] WTC

[Dan Moran]

A graphic regarding the WTC is up on the QOA website.

www.queenofangels.com

I have a nice high-resolution photo of the World Trade Center, pre-attack,
as the wallpaper on my computer. I'll e-mail it to anyone who wants it (or
put it up on QOA if enough people want it.)

~~~~~

No one on this list can believe I'm a fan of George Bush's -- and on the day
of the crisis I said vicious things about the man as he was flying around
the country. I am informed today by a good liberal democrat that the
President does _not_ have the authority to decide where to go when the
Secret Service has decided his life is in danger. If true my opinion of Bush
has been raised substantially -- with the exception of that day he has hit
virtually all the right notes at a time when it would have been easy to slip
into belligerancy, mawkishness, or any of a dozen other traps.

Taking nothing away from Bush ... another Republican who I have not been a
fan of, Rudolph Giuliani, reminds me why dictatorships are sometimes
attractive. You could do worse than Giuliani to run a country by fiat in
time of war. He's a great man in the classic sense -- outsized and faintly
ridiculous when dealing with squeegee vendors; exactly the right size for
this. I don't think I've ever been more impressed by a politician.

~~~~~

Thank you to those of you who shared your experiences here. All of this is
off-topic, but no more shattering event has happened in my lifetime. I
believe in us. I believe the United States is stronger than this and better
than this. One of my good friends, a young man named Ray, is a towelhead.
I'm a mick -- my father still sends money to Sinn Fein. Another friend,
Doug, is an English immigrant to the United States; he grew up in Liverpool
and doesn't like getting into elevators today because my second-cousins in
Ireland were blowing up buildings when he was a boy, possibly with some
portion of the money my father continues to send.

I love and respect my father, and perhaps I should not criticize him in this
semi-public forum ... but in his financial support of Sinn Fein, in his
verbal support for the IRA, he's _wrong_.

I'm not a mick ... I'm a _Los Angelean_. I've got a Lakers poster and a
plack with that nigger Magic Johnson on it in my office. (My boys have those
niggers Kobe & Shaq hanging on their walls.) My cell phone has a Lakers logo
on it. I've never been to Ireland and I _don't care_ what the English did to
my grandparents. My friend Ray speaks Farsi ... but he is not a towelhead.
He is a United States Marine who was born and raised in Chicago. Today he
sent e-mail to the Marine Corps. telling them where he was, what his
technical skills were, and offered to reenlist if they would take him. He's
23 and married. My friend Doug is in the US 10 years now; he is as much an
American as I am despite his English accent.

I'm not worried that we will destroy bin Laden. We will. And the Taliban,
too, and a good thing, that. I only hope we do to Afghanistan what we did to
Japan, for good and bad; level it, install a puppet government, install a
constitution and force democratic elections. I am only a little worried that
the racism that runs just beneath the skin of our country in good times,
will break out and turn into anti-Arab racism. What I am worried about is
the cycle of violence that the Old World has learned to live with. I do not
want us to learn to live with it. Destroy the terrorists, yes. Invade the
country or countries that shelter terrorists, yes. But I hope we do it the
old-fashioned way; send in soldiers, and then send in money, and help
rebuild the conquered. We _know_ this works; it worked for Europe, it worked
for Japan. Killing people and going home again will only drag us into the
cycle that Europe and the Middle East have never managed to break out of.
Nothing would be more heartening to me than to watch the Congress of the
United States declare war on Afghanistan, or Syria, or Iraq, or whomever we
need to declare war on -- if we approach the job the way our grandparents
did, and not the way that Johnson and Nixon did in the 60s and 70s. Nothing
would frighten me more than another executive action, like the Gulf War, or
Vietnam. That will probably fail, and in the process might doom my children
to live in a world that we thought, protected by our oceans, we had managed
to escape.

People will forgive you for conquering their country and rebuilding it. They
will not forgive you for bombing it and going home to watch the Super Bowl.

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