The Nature of Things

I turned on the radio this morning and heard a speaker at the 9/11 commemoration intoning "...They killed our citizens, but they could not kill our citizenship."  No, I thought, we did that to ourselves. We killed our citizenship by accepting without question the lies we were told about what had happened.  Saddam Hussein was responsible.  There were weapons of mass destruction just waiting to be deployed against us.  And so we allowed our young men and women to be sent to invade a country which had done nothing to harm us and there we killed thousands of innocents among its citizens.  Many more than the terrorists killed on 9/11. We killed our citizenship by allowing the suspension of civil liberties and by denying that basic human rights applied to our enemies.  And so we closed our eyes and ears while torture was committed in our name.  We looked the other way while people were thrown into secret prisons and denied legal representation or visits from...

Recently, I wrote a post here about the 13 books that everybody says they have read but haven't . I had actually read seven of the books on the list, but one of the remaining six was a book that I could not remember having heard of. In fact, I could not remember having heard of the author either. That writer was David Foster Wallace and the book was Infinite Jest . It had been published and evidently made a big splash back in the mid 1990s when I, apparently, wasn't paying attention. I commented in my post that I had no intention of reading the book, but I felt guilty about that. How could I dismiss a book and a writer that I didn't even know? So, I decided to find out about the writer and his work. Reading about Wallace, the man , gave me a lot of empathy for him. He was almost terminally shy and suffered from depression. He was also quite a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, much of it highly praised and award-winning. He had a philosophical turn of...

Remember when it was treasonous, in fact downright sacrilegious, to be against anything related to 9/11? That, after all, is how George Bush and the neo-cons sold their bogus war in Iraq, so that people wouldn't dare oppose it. It was all to do with 9/11 - and weapons of mass destruction - except that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11; we would have been more justified in attacking Saudi Arabia. And the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. But I digress. These days, though, it seems that 9/11 just doesn't carry the cachet that it once did. The House of Representatives has just proved it . When the attack on New York came on that perfect late summer day in 2001, it wasn't only the emergency personnel in the city who responded. People from all over the country - some of them even from Texas - dropped what they were doing and went there to help. Some spent weeks or even months there amid the toxic air and debris combing through the rubble to recover bodi...