TERRORISM AND TINY ZIBBS
This extraordinary photo is of the two Finance Coordinators of the 2003 meeting of the governing boards for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, held this week in Dubai. Geetha Ezhuvath is on the left. She is not a Moslem. Sara Al Kaabi on the right, most obviously is.
The Toleration of Evil
It is impossible for the ordinary human mind to fully grasp the evil of Joseph Stalin. He purposefully engineered the starving to death of over ten million people in Ukraine. In terms of mass murder, Stalin's Ukrainian Holocaust was an even greater crime than Hitler's Jewish Holocaust. Millions more were hauled off to be enslaved and die in the Gulag, or tortured and shot for the slightest suspicion of anything Stalin was suspicious of. Many of his closest deputies were ordered to put their parents, wives, or children to death to prove their loyalty. Yet this tyranny, this monstrous evil, is not a mystery. Evil exists, deeply embedded in certain human souls. That isn't mysterious; it is a basic fact of human society. The true mystery is why and how such is evil is tolerated. Stalin tyrannized the Soviet Union for thirty years. In all those years, there is not one single known attempt on his life. Not one. Which then, is the greater depravity: Stalin killing people, or no one killing him? The former, of course. Evil itself is the greater evil -- but toleration of it is the greater mystery.
George and Alberto
I recently received a very kind letter from ToThePointer Hagan Hetz, of the famous Fairview Evergreen Nurseries in Pennsylvania (www.fairviewevergreen.com). He wanted to know what I thought of President Bush's September 7 address to the nation on Iraq. OK, Hagan, here it goes. While listening to GW, I was thinking about Alberto Fujimori.
The Religion of Environmentalism
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance…
THE RELIGION OF PEACE
Earlier this week I had lunch with one of the most extraordinary human beings gracing our planet -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Our gracious hosts were Lalit Mansingh, Indian Ambassador to the US, and his wife Indira at their Residence in Washington. I congratulated Ambassador Mansingh on his country being a sanctuary where Tibetan culture and religion still freely flourishes, such as in the regions of Ladakh and Zanskar.
Our Heroes and Theirs
[Editor's Note: Last Tuesday night, September 9, a Palestinian suicide-terrorrist set off a bomb at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem. The following was written by Jan Medved, an Israeli businessman whose son was one of the first upon the scene.] Last night's terror struck close to home. The boom of the blast at Cafe Hillel on Emek Refaim Street shook the windows of our house and left no doubt that we were hit again -- this time in our own neighborhood.
The 21st Century Einstein
When Albert Einstein wrote and offered his initial papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with no academic credentials. Needless to say, for established professional physicists, the overthrow of the principles upon which their lives' work was based by a 26 year-old kid nobody every heard of did not go over too well.So almost 100 years later, here comes another kid, a high school dropout no less, who may impact 21st Century science the way Einstein did the 20th. Peter Lynds, a 27 year-old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, may change the way that we think about time and its relationship to classical and quantum mechanics and cosmology.
Freedom Fighters and the New Republic
Last month, in the August 18/25 issue, The New Republic (TNR) magazine ran a cover story which focused on my role in creating the Reagan Doctrine, which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. While not critical of me directly, the article criticizes the leaders of the anti-Soviet freedom fighter movements the Reagan Doctrine supported. This is supposed to serve as a warning to the Bush White House regarding putative support for anti-radical movements within the Moslem world. Here is my response. We'll see what TNR does with it.
Israel Needs Rowdy Yates
You know I'm not Jewish. And I'm not a supporter of Israel for Millennial Christian reasons (e.g., Jews have to get the Holy Land back before there can be a Second Coming). I support Israel because I support Western Civilization, of which Israel is a part and because of which she is under attack. And also because I think proto-hominids who slaughter women and babies on purpose have no right to exist.
THE NIFTY FIFTY
As we come to the end of summer, it is time to take our minds off Middle East maelstroms, California circuses, and world craziness in general, and spend time instead on a summer soliloquy.
For some time now, my youngest son Jackson and I have been embarked on a project we call his “Nifty Fifty.” That is, for him to travel to and learn something really interesting about each of all fifty American states.
Jackson is now 11 years old. He has been with me twice around the world and to the North Pole three times. He has been 2,000 km across the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, 2,500 km across eastern Tibet, 3,000 km across the Sahara, and lived with Eskimos in Greenland and tribes in the heart of the Amazon. But above all, I want him to experience his own country, America.
This summer, instead of wandering off to some remote corner of the globe, we concentrated on his Nifty Fifty. At the summer’s start, Jackson was at 26. Now, at summer’s end, he’s at 40. In a succession of trips in July and August, he and I have driven almost 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) across our country.
Of course, Dad gets something out of this too. For me, this has been an opportunity to re-experience my country, to learn more about it along with Jackson. And the main lesson is this: America — the real America — is still here.
We are all being inundated from the Left and the Right with the message that America is going to hell in a handbasket. From the Left we get the message of hate, since a distinguishing characteristic of liberals is an endless attempt to appease the envy of America’s critics. From the Right we get the message of fear, since a distinguishing characteristic of conservatives seems to be an endless state of anguish over America’s losing her virtues.
Not that conservatives can’t marshal considerable evidence for their anguish, the Mexicanification of California and the Supreme Court sodomizing Texas being two examples from a multitude. Nonetheless, after traveling down back roads and wandering through communities from Savannah, Georgia to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spending time with cowboys in Muskogee, Oklahoma, farmers in the Boot Heel of Missouri, students at Notre Dame in Indiana, fisherfolk in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and presidents of companies in New York City, I can assure you that this is a country of extraordinary cultural strength.
The impact of driving 6,000 miles through America can for me be epitomized in three words: beauty, peace, and friendliness.
I lost count of the number of times during those 6,000 miles that I was overwhelmed by scenes that caused me to think, “This is such a beautiful country.” The northeastern corner of Iowa is one huge postcard. The so-called “Trail of Tears” from Arkansas to Oklahoma is through paradisiacal parkland that any Indian should think was a Happy Hunting Ground. Then there are the towns.
From Galena, Illinois to New Bern, North Carolina, America is filled with beautiful towns with beautiful homes. Yet America’s beauty is of a particular kind — not ostentatious and imposing, but a Middle Class Beauty, prosperous, comfortable, well-kept, clean, regular people living good lives and taking care of what is theirs.
Liberals will now be scoffing at this point, asking what about all the slums, the poverty, the crime, the hicks in their undershirts on the front porch of their shacks with their yard littered with empty beer cans and old cars up on cinder blocks? That stuff is out there all right, but it’s isolated and rare. Like the small blue islands amidst the vast red ocean in the US County map depicting the 2000 presidential election results (Bush red, Gore blue).
You have to go out of your way to search and find those poverty patches the liberals caterwaul about and claim are Typical America. Drive 6,000 miles and you will learn they are Atypical America. Like liberals themselves.
America the Beautiful is not just a song — it is reality. Another reality is America the Peaceful. This is the antithesis of a violent country. Trust me, I have been in a lot of wars, and in a lot of countries enduring a lot of violence. Countries with a lot of soldiers patrolling streets and guarding buildings, where people are nervous, skittish, and suspicious. America is the opposite. America exudes an aura of peacefulness. Everywhere Jackson and I went, folks were going about their lives peacefully — the total opposite of fearful suspicion.
The third reality that most impressed Jackson and me is America the Friendly. In hundreds of interactions, from trap shooters in Bellefontaine, Ohio, backwoodsfolk in the hills of southern Tennessee, people on the streets of Chicago when you ask them for directions, vendors in Charleston, South Carolina, high school kids in Dallas, on and on, people were pleasant and friendly toward us.
We live in such an incredibly wonderful country. We can get back to all its problems in September. Just take a moment now to put all of our national woes aside, and reflect how impossibly lucky we are to be living in this place at this moment in history.
I am trying my best to enable Jackson to experience this first-hand. He’s getting a handle on America’s origins, from where the first shot was fired at North Bridge in Concord to the last at Surrender Field in Yorktown. He’s seen America’s wonders from Yellowstone to Mammoth Cave. Yet he is coming to understand that America’s greatest wonder is Americans themselves.
One afternoon we were driving through a small town in eastern Oklahoma. We drove past a couple in a pick up truck. They were clearly in their sixties or seventies, grandma and grandpa. Grandma, however, wasn’t sitting by the passenger window. She was sitting in the middle, next to grandpa, like they were teen-agers on a first date.
I pointed them out to Jackson, and reminded him of the line in a favorite song of his, American Pie, where Don McLean sings about his being “a teen-age bronking buck with a pink carnation and a pick up truck.” “That is so cool,” was Jackson’s observation. “Old folks just like teen-agers.” He looked at me with a big smile. “Only in America, huh, Dad?” he asked.
“That’s right, buddy.” I replied. “You’ll only see that in America.”