AnimaMundi

"The Second Plane"

"The Second Plane" by Martin Amis is reviewed by David Aaronovith who claims that a portion of the left is trying to run him out of town.

Some quotes from Amis:

In March 2003, he gave warning that the “intellectually null” George Bush, “a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas” was leading his country into a disastrous trap, ineluctably provoking, inter alia, “an additional generation of terror from militant Islam”.

“If September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also of desperate fascination. Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits, and medics' smocks of the Islamic radical?”

“Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion.”

“The champions of militant Islam are misogynists, women-haters; they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. Like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock responses, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations.”

We Shall See

Charlie Wilson's War was an enjoyable East Texas-politico romp. It purports to tell an important story in the history of our hideous foreign policy. It is Hollywood-Bollywood. Before I get to the gist of the post, there was one eerie statement in the movie that bears mentioning. Someone in the movie states very emphatically twice that President Muhammed Zia-ul-Hac of Pakistan, whose looks reminded me of Musharaff, did not kill Bhutto. Against pleas from the west, he had Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of the recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto, hanged after a coup. Here's a NYT's article about Bhutto's legacy.

I don't know much about the names of the players in the whole historical dynamic  between Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, I wanted to find out how faithful Hollywood was to historical fact. Like I was surprised after digging a bit. I had read some blurb about Tom Hanks "not being to handle the 9/11 thing". I came home and read this piece on the Alternet site.

CIA agent Gust Avrakotos' money quote:

"A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, 'Oh how wonderful.' But a Zen master who lives in the village says, 'We shall see.' The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, 'Oh how awful.' The Zen master says, 'We shall see.' The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, 'Oh, how wonderful.' The Zen master says, 'We shall see.' "

WTC

We were in NYC for my mate's birthday. Her birthday extends two weeks before and after her date of birth. She, both of them, was/were born on June 11th. I took this shot in June in the mid 80's. Prior to this, I had spent time in the WTC as part of the NYS Office of Shelter and Supported Housing and as an insignificant assistant to the higher ups. Although, I was once given credit for the quality caterer that I contracted with for several working luncheons. I once looked out of the Commissioner's office window. It looked out at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I had very real sense of vertigo, as in the movie. For this jaunt, the weather was perfect for NYC, hot and humid 80-90. We went from gelato to water and back all weekend long. A different world apart. Then again, there's nothing new under the sun.

Raining Conspiracies

Rigorous Intuition  is a very thought provoking site. Jeff is a Canadian who has done extensive research on 9/11 among many other topics.