Now a child gets Anthrax!
A very smart (and very long) piece from the Sunday Times of London by Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington argues that we are entering a new era of war in the world. First came wars of power among princes, up through World War I. Then came wars (including cold wars) of ideology and economics. Now we face wars of civilizations: essential differences in religion, culture, history, ethnicity, outlook — gulfs that are harder to bridge (you can switch, he argues, from communist to capitalist a helluva lot easier than you can switch from Jewish to Muslim). This is the extension of the never-ending battles in the Middle East and also the extension of the various wars in Yugoslavia and its successors. And, yes, as the world comes closer together, there is more opportunity for conflict.
Note, too, this from John le CarrÈ’s piece (below) on Osama bin Laden’s male ego: “The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.”
– Sighted in Jersey City (aka Terror Town): Man in full Muslim mufti dashing by on rollerblades. Assimilation begins here.
– Next step in assimiliation: American Muslims want to elect a president by 2020, says Pravda.
