Fly Naked redux
– I want the record to show that I came up with the idea of flying naked on Dec. 22 and Dec. 23 — long before Thomas Friedman of the NY Times. Thanks to Will Vehrs and to letter-writer Frank Millheim, Jr. for giving me the credit I so richly deserve. Now if only I can get credit on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal and in Slate‘s new weblog, I’ll know I’ve arrived. Care to nominate me since I’m too humble? Tell them: Opinion Journal.
The germ
Two arguments that the anthrax villian is foreign (which remins m theses until I see evidence to the contrary):
> The Times of London says the literary sleuth who helped unmask both the Unabomber and the temporariliy anonymous author of Primary Colors says we should be looking to Pakistan.
> And the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal says the trail leads to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia.
Change for the sake of change
– Michael Wolff has a half-right column in New York about the changes in American after Sept. 11. He wants to poo-poo this as a big change, a monumental change in life because the war is short and most of America doesn’t (a) live in New York or (b) read newspapers. That’s where he’s wrong. Even granting that my own perspective is skewed as a witness and survivor, I still say that there are inevitable changes in how we live as a society now that we have been attacked on our own soil, now that we find a common cause against terrorism with a sometimes surprising worldwide coalition, now that we are forced out of what had been a growing isolationism, now that we have found unity. Oh, many of the changes that we have seen will be temporary (will New York stay nice?). But many will be long-lasting. We just don’t know which ones those are yet. And Wolff, at the end of his long screed [boy, it takes print people a lot longer than bloggers to say what they think — perhaps because print people are paid by the word and bloggers aren’t paid for anything] finally concludes that we don’t yet know exactly how Sept. 11 changed us. So he’s right there. And he’s right, too, when he points to big changes in media: hard in, soft out. War is Viagra.
Already?
– I know this is stupid but I was surprised to realize, thanks to the White House site, that Bush has been in office (almost) a year already. It seems like almost yesterday when he stole the election. It was only yesterday when we were innocent of war. It seems like forever ago when tech and the economy were riding high.
