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Re: Miami Herald

Liesel tarquini wrote:
> ...we will go to it, because they gave us nothing else to do. So what will
> our legacy be?  It cannot be peace, because peace will be portrayed as
> weakness to the fundamentalist.  We cannot reason with them: "Bad terrorist,
> bad".

If I understand you rightly, you are writing this not from your own point of
view, but echoing the view that you perceive coming from the culture around us,
right?  If so, then I agree, and that is what is breaking my heart.  That is
what disturbs me about Bush's "good vs. evil" oversimplification.  People just
don't get up in the morning and decide to be terrorists.  If we insist on
pretending that they are irrational, inhuman, and beyond the pale (I have felt
since the first time I saw it that the Martians in _Mars Attacks_ were a clear
metaphor for stereotypical terrorists, like the aliens in 50s movies were
stand-ins for communists.), we will never solve the *causes* of terrorism, we
will only respond to terror with terror, further perpetuating the cycle of
violence, hatred, and horror.  Unless America really looks at our own
culpability in acts of terror around the world, and makes changes to stop it,
this will happen again.  As long as we support right-wing dictators, as long as
American-made weapons kill innocent Palestinians, as long as we train people
like Bin Laden (yeah, if you haven't heard that yet, he's CIA-trained),
violence is going to come back to us.  Sure, we do good things in the world,
too, but to pretend that we've done *nothing* to make someone this angry at us;
that these people were *just* crazy, evil, madmen... that's not going to make
the problem go away.  We supported Saddam Hussein in his violence when it was
convenient to do so, and then we had to fight him.  We shoot down Iraqi planes
ostensibly to protect the Kurds, while we provide the Turkish government with
weapons that they use to massacre Kurds on their side of the border.  We
supported Manuel Noriega, and then invaded Panama to arrest him.  How much
longer is this going to go on????

> they said you will not kill me in my sleep, you will not ruin a beautiful
> tuesday again. you will not father and yet make my own fatherless.  there
> will not be a slow world holocaust, plain people picked off 5,000 at a time
> because you are on a power trip: because i am not afraid of you.

Isn't this *exactly* what they were trying to say to *us* by what they did last
Tuesday?

> As for Jerry, this is not God.  Has He worked like that since the old
> testament?

Frankly, I'm not convinced God worked like that even in the Old Testament.  I
think that was the motif that the writers found to try to make sense out of the
events going on around them: "we must have done something bad; God is punishing
us".  I disagree.  I don't even think it works as a motif in the Old Testament.
Some kings went against what the authors thought they should be doing, and were
phenomenally successful, in secular terms, although the books spit a lot of
bile against their successes, and gleefully herald their downfall (everybody
has a downfall, eventually).  The whole motif is a non-falsifiable hypothesis,
because God can wait as long as he wants to punish, and its up to you to figure
out after the fact which punishment went with which sin.  I think it's a big
mistake to start second-guessing God like that, because it leads to a "blame
the victim" mentality, and who among you will cast the first stone?

I think it's important to remember that when the Israelites felt that YHWH had
chosen them as his people, they were polytheists.  YHWH was one of many gods,
and the god who had chosen them as his people.  Other people had their gods.
Note that the commandment doesn't say "there are no other gods", it says "don't
have other gods before me".  That's why the monotheistic movement had such a
hard time eradicating the "high places"; that belief system was older, and
people trusted it more, kind of like how there are still pagan shrines all over
Germany.  They have saints in them now rather than gods, but the practice is
the same.  Anyway, back to Israel.  The idea that there was only one god came
along later (but still before most of the Old Testament was compiled), and so
the focus shifted from "this god picked us" to "THE God picked us".  Big
difference.  When we look back at the Canaanite invasion, we are looking into a
different mindset and worldview, in which he who has the strongest god wins.
The villages they sacked prayed to their god to protect them from Israel's god,
but they lost, and history is written by the winners.  I think to try to look
to those events for ethical instruction now is a big mistake.

Especially since Jesus trumped those cards in his teachings, anyway.  I don't
hear much along the lines of "love those who hate you" and "turn the other
cheek" coming from my national leaders right now.
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

http://www.zmag.org/zinncalam.htm
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