Bridge 9340 may have been architecturally flawed from the drafting board and if so, Minnesota's state bridge engineer offered, would lead to the question of "why the bridge stood for 40 years before collapsing." But such a line of reasoning is invisible to the theology of Congress, which holds that in Washington, D.C., all things are possible unless that prepotent, bursarial hand can be obstructed.
Senator Harry Reid, a believer, began the night of the accident, saying that a stubborn president slowed funding to civil construction. Members of Reid's party insinuated that appropriations could have been spent on the Mississippi River bridge only a week or two before, if not for the prospect of a captious White House veto.
From the bosom of federal embonpoint of their own helping, legislators denounce the one man in Washington for whom spending is not constitutional prerogative — as cheap. President Bush could have responded in many ways. What, after his signature, would the bridge have been reinforced by churning c-notes into a special portland cement? He chose practicality: "if rebuilding bridges is that big a priority," then spend it on that, "as opposed to helping individual congressman or senators realize pet projects in their districts." As if it were Washington's responsibility? The state of Minnesota maintained the bridge, and as any other, mostly through its own transportation budget.
Abetting the Democratic charge were newspaper headlines reporting 70,000 bridges in the United States earning a certain black mark from the Federal Highway Administration. Seventy thousand! — until one realizes that even bureaucracies close bridges and roads that are unsafe. And, too, that there are over 500,000 bridges in the country, very few the size of Bridge 9340, almost half of them locally owned; and, if the temptation to blame the president lingers, that in 1992, black marks went to 118,000 bridges.
One benefit to taking "what the good Lord gives you," as a gentle handyman once smiled to me, is a lessening of man's capacity for awesome feats making the perfect into an enemy of the in-any-way sensible. The least we can be thankful for is that the horrible event has not caused hallucinogenic trials of whichever public official can be trussed the most easily, as did the flooding of New Orleans.
The magazine of my alma mater, Syracuse University, arrived in the mail last Wednesday. Its jacket, typically glossy, was for this issue a pleasing, roughly textured matte, perhaps intended to conciliate alumni like myself who — uninterested in reading about the school's banal leftism — seldom get past the cover before throwing the periodical out.
I thumbed the last few pages of collegial announcements, then looked at content. One page featured a West Bank tour by an SI Newhouse School of Public Communications photojournalism graduate. Beneath an artful print of two little girls tripping through the same interstice in Israel's security barrier a terrorist bomber would, the alumnus described the town of Qalqilyah as "encircled" by the barrier and therefore "at the mercy of the Israeli government," a quotation accompanied by the editors' relation that the locality was "thriving farmland, now devastated."
The girdling of Qalqilyah is actual. Justification for such a thing, of course, is lost in the other two oblique phrases. Removed is the town's anchorage in the Islamist gang war and the extrusive danger therefrom.
Can Israel's government be blamed for defense of a state that is itself surrounded? Jerusalem has lately been provisioning foodstuffs to Gaza residents after the region's usurpation by Hamas. Also, indirectly, condoning the civilian use of "organic eggs, corn, mango, tomatoes and other vegetables" as projectiles — delectably ripe return-fire to terrorists' rockets launched at the Jewish city of Sderot. Mercy, indeed.
As we purpose to make right, we may need to reconcile our neighbor Democrats.
Good news from Iraq is sustained, on top of which comes better news. Parties, mostly leftward, with every incentive not to reverse their disapproving stances, are turning around. Headlines started to echo what soldiers have repeated — enough time and the enemy can be outwitted, outmaneuvered and beaten. Monday, a pair of academics leaned back towards confidence by calling the Iraqi front "a war we might just win," even against impatience; in the New York Times, no less. On television, journalists acknowledged that Baghdad's government can, if it is allowed by a lengthened American mission, toddle in the direction of liberal sovereignty.
If the enemy loses Iraq, whatever remains among Islamist and Arabist terrorists will be forced to eat years of rodomontade, conceding a democratizing state where once ruled the world's second-worst tyrant. That will ease staunching of the Near East's current effluence and, through reform, preventing any more. A lot of totalists who aren't religiose maniacs might give up the ghost, having witnessed the basest criminals on earth failing first to knock the free world over, and then unable to outlast it.
Then there is the Democratic Party, caught unprepared by circumstances. Spoiled after a smooth couple of seasons? Probably, since members are still insisting that what is over there isn't. Once victory has existential import, verifying Iraq as a place that must be by Congress' own arguments won, Democrats — if they are unwilling to ally with the president — can only push further, and propose to cede every front, as some caucuses on the edge already have. Those are actions realized in the most distracted American mind as reckless. In the politician's mind, electoral non-starters whatever the national mood.
Reported from Capitol Hill, fair winds are, for the opposition, "a real big problem." Leftists, Democrats, want to resume support for the Iraqi campaign? Let them. One corollary: political repatriates must, to sincerely accredit trials and success, swear off partisan antipathy of George Bush.
Rudy Giuliani ascendant, efforts to run the former mayor's skeletons to ground are underway. Last week, a commentator on the left found the reel of a speech Giuliani gave at a rally, the fall before the 1993 New York mayoral race.
In the carefully edited twenty-five seconds of film we see Giuliani behind a podium, much younger and quite different from his appearance today. He is dressed for an office but as an adjunct, not management: light button-down shirt and tie, large and blocky spectacles, receding hair casually swept across. Rudy Giuliani is an unlikely empire's potentate. He looks staid. He isn't angry, but is, with a raised voice, midway through a rebuke of then-mayor David Dinkins.
"The mayor doesn't know why the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low," Giuliani says into the microphone. Cut to protesters marching, voiceover: "He blames it on me, he blames it on you" — cut to Giuliani, quick zoom as the man shouts, "bull——!"
The sight of today's leading Republican presidential candidate "unhinged," suggested the presenter, might weaken Giuliani's bid to "win the support of GOP 'values voters.'" Has he — have those in agreement — ever watched a stem-winder, or heard men talking roughly? How, on a New York street, could the word in question surprise, let alone offend? Were Giuliani censuring, from the left, a Republican reputedly laying city hall's bad fortunes on the force, not a single facet of the performance could be judged as heterodox to a tradition the last century gave the country almost to surfeit, speaking truth to power.
Least implausible is that Giuliani physically resembles William Foster from the movie Falling Down but even then, Michael Douglas' protagonist did something of a wry public good with his blunt-force vigilantism. The intense reformer is ever a sympathetic character, and Rudy, who was simply using words, has had voters value them highly.
In June I registered a creative work with the United States Copyright Office. Amid the submission instructions was a sentence in italics — "Please note that our mail service is severely disrupted" — followed by, in parentheses, a pointer to an explanation. Mail sent to an address on Capitol Hill, read the notice, undergoes screening that can take as long as a business week.
Three to five days? These pains bring one to ponder whence and whither. I went back five years, the detriment of anthrax in letters having long been out of mind. An associated memory from the time was of grumbling over the many burdensome searches in airports, each new complication intended to prevent the last clever trick pulled by a terrorist or other lunatic.
Traveling by airplane two months ago, I witnessed a dramatization of the argument in favor of profiling before the boarding gate. A man in his seventies was lifted from his wheelchair and bundled by two Transportation Security Administration workers through the metal-detection arch. There is a man or woman at the bureau, expecting disgrace if the one slipping past the checkpoint brings down a flight, who will maintain that if the elderly can lose their pension to a con man they can be a terrorist's dupe. But we still inquire, mostly seriously: Had the security department supposed a man of this age and infirmity might seize the steward's cart, roll up the aisle while bombarding the cockpit door with bags of peanuts, proclaiming himself the great-great-great grandson of King Philip's siege engine, Bad Neighbor?
Unless we find undisputed evidence that everyday people can be matriculated into a study of how to destroy innocents, hundreds or thousands at a time, arguments supporting the offensive removal of those already tenured in such clandestine schools remains valid. Our vulnerability is less of a lack of "security" than a count of the many openings attendant to living free. How many loopholes do we wish to close?
Could it be that Osama bin Laden absconded from life altogether? Following an early July videotape of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a message from the Saudi terrorist was snatched by allied intelligence. There is no surprise in al Qaeda agitprop continuing to emerge, nor one in the age of footage of the old man suggesting bin Laden is long deceased. What does astonish is the fixation of Washington's political class on one whose significance in either world events or the organization he founded has diminished by any metric. Dead or alive, pseudo-religious fascists from the Philippines to Birmingham, England get along fine without Osama.
The latest National Intelligence Estimate details the persistence, if not the recrudescence, of al Qaeda, particularly in rugged, southwest Asian middles of nowhere. Well, whatever the setbacks in Pakistan's frontier — or those in Afghanistan's — every fair-weather salient towards Kabul attempted by the Taliban and al Qaeda for the past six years has been either turned away or smashed. Al Qaeda's mythology has been countervailed by four, going on five years of the gruesome killing of Arabs and Muslims trying to instate civil order with fair and regular elections.
The Bush administration, which these days jumps if the opposition says Boo, is yet lucid and confident about the difference between celebrity and centrality. Where did, say, the Islamists in Tehran come up with their fashion of totalism? Not a Saudi millionaire's boy gone bad. Who do most Democrats demand "be found"? Osama bin Laden. It makes you wonder when one's case for victory in war rests on chasing after a very likely dead man.
Printed in the London Times last fortnight, the words of Pius Ncube, archbishop of Bulawayo: "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe," meaning the vampiric despot Robert Mugabe. "We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready."
Four years ago Ncube's fellows used a neologistic verb, "to Saddam" — as in, "Mister Bush, please Saddam us" — while begging to be pulled from the nightmare of the former Southern Rhodesia. As a dictator, Robert Mugabe is in his own class of paltriness, insisting that the skeletal Zimbabwe is still his kingdom. In retaliation for, or perhaps in spite of, the Catholic leader's clarion, Mugabe reportedly muttered about the clergy and chastity, then singled out Ncube himself.
What with Zimbabwe's rotted judiciary, a civil suit from a man accusing Ncube of cuckolding him should have been only a slight impediment. But a week later, the archbishop wouldn't accept the quotation in the Times.
"Any intervention should build," said Ncube on July 10th, inanely, "on support of the region and the negotiations they are engaged in." Wait for the African Union to force Mugabe into a fair election, he resolved — on the order of proposing, Wait for Mugabe's distant cousins to tell the old crook to ease up some.
We do not know, at this hour, if the archbishop was refuting or recanting. Nor are the adultery charges, however convenient for Mugabe, necessarily contrived. And while a fallen man can still do good he does in willful sin, whether serving God or the world, less than he might. Mugabe will terrorize and starve people in the meantime. If the Times story was true, here is some friendly counsel to Pius Ncube: responsible civilian and military commanders will not, with the intention of deposing a brutish kleptocracy, commit soldiers who have each been issued a semi-automatic good intention.
The national conversation on war has turned acrimonious, and contributors at National Review are at it again, depreciating liberal reform in an attempt to tighten up their arguments against the left. Beware: opposition to the so-called "theology of freedom" — the axiom stating liberty's universality — is relativistic and deterministic at its base, and simply an expedient.
If Arab Muslims, goes the line of reasoning, a) have managed this long without democracy, b) must they, then, have done it partly out of a preference for order over freedom, and c) furthermore, if state media over there broadcasts public apologia for whatever inhumanity has carried on in the odd police state, can't this be d) evidence of a culture impermeable to Western assertions of dignity and individuality? Conclusion: leave them to their savagism.
First, one can draw a parallel between governance in predominantly Muslim areas of the world and those in the Christian world half a millennium ago. Thrust aside romanticism, and medieval Europe was ruled by gangsters — incapable of the volume and precision of the Near Eastern brand of barbarity only because it was the metal age. The church of Jesus Christ was once subordinate to totalism and its abominations; Islam is lifted for the dissimulation of another violent criminality, but it is thus today. The Bosphorus is a kind of temporal chasm a naturalist might delineate as he stumbles across an immaculate aboriginal tribe.
Second, inheritance is not inherence. People born into a society can, in movements, be separated from it. Claims that "Muslims are this way" conflate Near Eastern societies with the people in them. "Culture matters," finishes editor Rich Lowry, "and that's something Bush is very reluctant to acknowledge." But culture, Mr. Lowry, only matters while it is left intact. Where are the Teutonic, Latin, samurai cultures that led to martial radicalism in the industrial age? Gone, effaced, by the occupations and exhortations of democratists.
Here and there, Republicans are moody, disconsolate, resentful. The not-very-happy are led by immigration fetishists, so unrelenting for an absolute remedy to Mexican illegal aliens — and incensed that George Bush, as pledged in 2000, governs contra — that they have in numbers threatened to leave the party, disavow the president and by consequence permit Democrats the White House and Congress. Wartime national security would be traded for vindication, while the new immigration policy thrown in would be Mr. Bush's times two, without the reservations — and these disgruntled rightists could get even madder.
Peggy Noonan, who went on sabbatical in 2004 to assist the president's reelection campaign, signed off on what, in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, read like a discursive letter on fraternal ennui does before simplification, by the editors of Dear Abby, to an intelligible five sentences. No more about "great relief to see there are actually a number of little fish like you, trying hard to swim upstream" athwart "left-liberalism reigns." Ms. Noonan notices that President Bush "doesn't seem to be suffering" from second-term disappointments. She finds "the seemingly effortless high spirits," the equanimity, "jarring."
Such are explosions of passion. Those waylaid by creation's great check on rational thought have forgotten, or simply ignore, rules of political geography: if a president acts, it may be that Jane happens to approve yet Missy does not; and then the other way around tomorrow. This is not politics but the disparate opinions of two or more people. If Missy or Jane react to disagreements with a furor, the deduction is: they want a sweetheart, not a statesman, and once they get it, will be mercurial as any lover.
Segments of the Republican base aren't pleased at a number of officeholders for many good reasons. But a lot construe idle congressmen or senators as more than figures of synecdoche, demanding that the whole party go.
How to deny re-election to Senator Chuck Hagel, knowing that Rhode Island elected a man even more recalcitrant than Lincoln Chafee? Or to Senator George Voinovich, after a double-take of Mike DeWine and Sherrod Brown? Nebraska's attorney general, Jon Bruning, is preparing for a primary challenge to Hagel. Bruning relays that "Al-Qaeda has declared Iraq a major front in their global campaign," and as for Baghdad's government, "Benchmarks may be established to measure progress and develop strategic goals but should not be used as a part of a timeline to force an early surrender" — none of which you will ever hear Hagel say. He's pretty good on borders and taxes, too.
Jon Bruning is to Hagel as Stephen Laffey was to Chafee, and Pat Toomey was to Arlen Specter. Are malcontents serious about applying pressure to Republican points of leverage? Or are they in a rage, and can't think straight?
Did the Danish National Space Center's Henrik Svensmark realize that peer recognition would be the laying of hounds on him?
"I simply thought," Svensmark confessed in an interview with Discover magazine, that causality between the sun and climate "would be very interesting, and I certainly had no idea it would be viewed as so controversial." The physicist hypothesizes that temperatures and weather respond to changes in cloud activity caused by levels at which Sol's irradiation disrupts "energetic particles coming from the interstellar media." Calling the intercalated agency "cosmic rays," Svensmark conducted a recent experiment with air, ionization, ultraviolet lamps and a skylight.
What did he learn? That which parties responsible for declamations of "global warming" — recently criticized by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green, authors of methods in scientific prediction, for substituting consistency for verity — haven't borne in mind. First, results of the experiment corroborated Svensmark's theories, but introduced many more questions that Svensmark intends to study before accosting bodies politic and public. Second, there is still the robust possibility that since, shrugs Svenmark, "we can't predict the sun...we couldn't do anything about it."
And the brain trust at the United Nations spurned Svensmark's work as "extremely naive and irresponsible." Humanists are the unlikely disparagers of Copernican reasoning. Sun, moon, stars — all removed from the account of Earth as a cynosure, Man as a tragic figure. Would that a vis-a-vis meeting with outer space return awe and modesty to scientific discourse. Considering how clarity still eludes us, somebody might impute cosmic marvels to the mephitic contrails of our rocket ships.
