The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of those moments I remember vividly from my youth. I was only 13 at the time, but I remember the pictures. I remember sensing the importance of the event. It was a defining moment for me politically. Like so many of these defining moments, it’s usually the small, individual moments that are the most striking. Like the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, or the man standing in front of the tank during the Tiananman Square protests just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell.

There’s no one picture from the fall of the Wall that stands out, but I do remember video of West Berliners standing on the wall, helping East Berliners climb up over the wall. Amazing stuff.

Anyway, here’s a link to a lot of pictures from that time. I’m struck most about how dated everything looks. Yes, I know it was twenty years ago, and so they would look dated. But photos age strangely. I remember those days, and my memories don’t look so dated to me. Funny how that works. Photo number ten, of the section of wall pulled down, is another I remember from that day. But then, it was a day full of iconic images.

In the years that followed, there was a lot of justified triumphalism, as Eastern Europe pulled itself out of its long nightmare that had begun with the rolling in of Nazi tanks, and the ensuing Holocaust, followed by two generations of political oppression under the Soviets. A lost, dark half-century of misery. There was also a lot of unjustified triumphalism, nonsense about the End of History and other bullshit. Old oppressions replaced with new variations. In a lot of ways, the conflicts of the 90s and in the Middle East today can be traced back to clashes that people thought had been resolved by the wall’s fall. Aftershocks through history. Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan are what they are today, for instance, largely because of Soviet influence in the region. The same goes with North Korea.

It’s sad to think that our current world crises are, in large part, merely echoes of the decisions of the twentieth century’s greatest liberators and tyrants, but it’s true. So, 20 years after the wall, it’s worth remembering the long reach of history.

tags: culture, democracy, foreign policy, human rights, politics, whatever
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So, I’m watching The Vampire Diaries, and…

Yes. I watch The Vampire Diaries. Wanna make something of it?

So, I’m watching the show, and the protagonist good-guy vamp Stefan has yet another opportunity to kill antagonist bad-guy vamp Damon, and … doesn’t. The first time, Stefan traps Damon in a room full of vamp-bane, and now stabs Damon with a stake … in the stomach.

Damon has killed … gosh, I’ve forgotten how many. Six? Including Stefan’s “uncle” and now one of Stefan’s oldest friends, not to mention turning bad-girl Vicki, getting her killed in the process. And then, despite the fact that Damon is a killer, Stefan lets him go.

This is idiotic. There is no good reason for letting this jerk live. The only reason the writers did it is because … they have to. Killing the bad guy now would mean no more stories. So they come up with lame excuses for the good guy not to do his job and whack the bad guy. Seriously, this is dumb.

I’ll go to my more beloved vampire franchise, Buffy, and note (spoilers ahead for those who have not seen all of Season Two–come on guys, its been a decade! Why haven’t you watched Buffy yet?) that Buffy did the same thing with Angel/Angelus. She could have stopped him and it resulted in the tragic death of someone close to the main gang. Of course, Buffy actually did have a bit of a reason for doing what she did.

Still, this dithering by the good guys pisses me off. I had similar irksome feelings toward The Dark Knight for doing the same thing. Batman has the opportunity to put the bad guy down, but nooooo, the good guy can’t kill the bad guy. Sorry, I don’t see all the torment. Sure, we hate to do the moral calculation, but it’s there: bad guy dead results in one dead body; leaving him alive results in many dead bodies. Of innocent people.

I’ve pointed out this modern foible before. We think the problem is the killing. But its not. Killing is a last-resort kind of thing, but in these fictional cases, there’s almost always no other option. The burden of being the good guy means doing what others won’t do. And that almost always means taking life. Now, the burden is knowing that some day one might be called to account for that killing. If the good guy is confident enough in his or her judgment about what is right or wrong, this is not an issue. If you’re gonna be the good guy, you’ve got to know this.

In which case, failing to kill the bad guy means either: 1) the good guy is not confident that he’s really the good guy, or 2) the good guy is a coward. Coward in the sense that he knows that killing the bad guy is the right thing to do, but is too afraid to bear the burden of judgment. Now, one can certainly argue that no one should be so confident in the idea that they are the good guy that they are able to justify killing. But the results of that position are obvious: more dead innocent people. To believe that, one must believe that it is inherently more moral for many innocent people to die at the hands of an evil person than it is for one evil person to die at the hands of an innocent person.

Honestly, the total body-count approach seems leagues more moral than that. I have very little patience for characters in novels, movies and television shows that arrogate all sorts of moral authority to themselves and then back away from the moments in which they might, just for a moment, actually begin to bear the burden of the power they claim. Being a hero accrues all sorts of fame and glory, but it also means that you’ve got a massive bit of baggage to carry. In the end, that’s why I gave The Dark Knight a pass on Batman’s dithering–because in the end, the movie recognized the burden heroes carry, even if they defined it slightly differently than I would have.

I understand: the modern hero is supposed to be sensitive and not want to kill. Fine. But they’re gonna pay for not killing, and that not killing means more killing, in the end. Not less. The irritating thing is that they never seem to learn this lesson. I’d be content if they’d learn. Instead we’re given conveniently stupid good guys getting people killed because they’re unwilling to make the difficult decisions. They aren’t heroes, they’re cowards.

tags: Books, culture, ethics, movies, television, whatever
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I don’t normally do lists, but I recently saw a list of technologies that we use today that will be gone in ten years. Now, I also don’t like to make tech predictions (they’re always wrong). So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to list a few technologies/industries that I think should die. And soon.

1. Network Television/Movie Studios/Recording Labels

I’ve thought quite a bit about this over the years, and I wish that television networks would die. And movie studios, for that matter. With the internet, there is an easy, low-cost distribution mechanism for artists. I would prefer something like a guild system, where artists of similar styles or goals share resources and distribute directly to consumers. We get lower prices, more direct contact with the artists, and no more of the intervention of studios in the artistic life of writers, musicians and actors. Good riddance.

2. Drive media

By this I mean optical discs of all types. There’s simply no need for them anymore. Download things off the Internet. If you want to save them, save them on a mass storage device like a hard drive. For portability, flash storage is smaller, more durable, and more convenient.

3. Coax Cable

I’d like coax to die and be replaced with fiber. It’ll be a long and expensive road, but in the end we’ll have so much bandwidth we won’t know what to do with it.

4. Cables, period

There’s no need for cables. Wireless bandwidth is enough for nearly all data within a home. Why shouldn’t my audio components simply know when my TV is nearby? Why shouldn’t my laptop instantly be able to stream music directly through my stereo system just by being in the same room? Why shouldn’t my iPod simply see any home speakers and be able to use them without connecting things with a cable? And why can’t the same thing be true of power?

5. DRM

Data, as the saying goes, just wants to be free. The fact is, we have a difficult time at the moment knowing precisely what people would pay for digital content. Purchased data is so heavily encumbered by rights management that I can never be sure of its true market value: I purchase a song or video on iTunes, but can’t share it easily between my systems. Certainly DRM free movies, television shows and music would result in an immediate deflation of value. But eventually I imagine a market could emerge where people who want the data will pay for it on their own, not because it’s how they get the data, but because its the only way they can guarantee they’ll get more of what they like.

There’s more I could think of. There’s also some tech that I imagine we’ll still be stuck with in ten years. Some have said that the keyboard and mouse are on the way out. I am not convinced of this. Along with the keyboard and mouse, I’ve seen people predict the end of the standard game console controller. Only someone who has never played games could say this. The reality of motion and touch controls is that they remain far more inefficient than standard controllers today. Just as voice recognition has been on the cusp of acceptance for thirty years, the mouse and keyboard is the mousetrap of computer interfaces. It’s too simple and intuitive to be easily replaced. Why? Because it just works. Anyone who has struggled with voice recognition systems and Wii motion controls knows this first hand.

Wired telephones are already going, replaced by cell phones. I rather suspect gasoline cars will be gone within my lifetime. Perhaps within twenty years. I hope to see more distributed power generation. In fact, I might go so far as to make a general prediction about technology in the next twenty years: distributed systems, rather than centralized systems, will prevail. Distributed power. Distributed data. Fewer gatekeepers. At least, I hope that is the case.

tags: drm, markets, media, technology, whatever
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Over at the Amazon website, Armchair Commentary has decided to rank the Pixar animated movies, and astonishingly hasn’t been crucified for his choices. People tend to feel strongly about these. Since I’ve seen all but one, I guess I can rank them. I don’t generally like to rank movies in terms of good and better, so I won’t. I will say that Incredibles has to be my favorite animated movie of all time, though. Monsters, Inc probably would come in second. Beyond that, there’s a layer of “okay” movies, including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 (which was better than the first, in my opinion), and Finding Nemo. Then Ratatouille trails alone a little bit further behind. The rest merit little more than a “meh” from me. Cars, A Bug’s Life and Wall-E just did absolutely nothing for me.

I will say that for Dreamworks films, the only ones that really struck me as any good were Antz (which still strikes me as not for kids), and Kung Fu Panda, which (though flawed) would probably come in second or third on my all-time-favorites list for animated movies. So I guess I can say that Pixar is still the king of animation at the moment. I’m not sure I’m happy to see that a Kung Fu Panda sequel is in the works for 2011. Along with two more Shreks. Yeesh.

Animated movies have become entirely too formulaic. That’s probably why I liked Coraline so much. It was traditional, and a bit old-fashioned in some ways, but in being so it was daring and edgy. Strange, that. Other movies have their protagonist, the underlying message, a lot of unrelated humor, and an entirely predictable ending. They’re entirely too politically correct. They’re afraid to do anything too different. Kinda like TV in that way. It’s amazing the amount of bullshit you have to filter out when watching anything from Hollywood these days. It reminds me of washing down green beans with a drink as a kid because I hated the taste. Should we really have to do that? I don’t think so. Hollywood may think it’s for our own good and all, cramming all this PC bull down our throats, but don’t they realize that we’re not buying into it?

tags: movies, whatever
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No, not Optimus Primes, but numerical primes. You know, numbers divisible only by themselves and one. There is an unwritten rule among SF writers (particularly for TV) that any time a very specific number is mentioned, it should be prime. Why? Prime-ness is the mathematician’s way of imparting mystery and transcendence without referencing the big guy upstairs. Usually the prime-ness is not stated outright. They leave it to the watchers or readers out there to figure out the occult information on their own.

So, for instance, when I watched the first episode of FlashFoward, I noted that the time of the “blackout” was very specific: two minutes, seventeen seconds. Or 137 seconds. One-hundred and thirty-seven? Prime. Of course, the question was never whether or not the number was prime, but when in the show they’d acknowledge it. I haven’t seen yesterday’s epi yet, but I note that the name of the episode mentions the number of seconds. Is primeness mentioned? We’ll see tonight when I get around to watching the show.

Exception that proves the rule: Douglas N. Adams did not choose a prime number for his answer to life, the universe and everything. No, he chose 42, whose factors include 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 14, 21, and of course, 42. Modification to the exception that proves the rule: Star Trek: The Next Generation (and all shows since) uses 47 instead of 42. Why not use 42? TNG’s creators said that 42 was the answer to life, the universe and everything adjusted for inflation. Heh. So funny. Forty-seven? Prime, you idiots. Just shows that they didn’t quite fully understand the nature of Adams’s satirical genius.

Good ol’ DNA was smart enough to know that anyone reading his book would know to check the number for primeness, so he deliberately chose 42. A common, run-of-the-mill number. He’d know that the SF snots out there would be thinking, “Damn, he should have picked a prime number!” And he snickered at the lot of ‘em.

tags: science fiction, whatever
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Here’s an article over at Seed about the continuing attempts to build a working simulation of the human brain in a supercomputer. These articles tend to be a bit too optimistic for my taste. Perhaps it is because the objections to such projects are primarily philosophical, and that the writers tend to share the reductionist premises of such projects (if we can just model everything perfectly, then we can recreate the human brain).

I tend to be skeptical of the reductionist argument. At least in this article they reference some of the philosophical issues:

Some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, have argued that this divide between the physical facts of neuroscience and the reality of subjective experience represents an epistemological dead end. No matter how much we know about our neurons, we still won’t be able to explain how a twitch of ions in the frontal cortex becomes the Technicolor cinema of consciousness.

The article goes on to say that the scientists take this criticism seriously, but offer no real evidence of it. They talk about “transcending” traditional neuroscience, but it is difficult to take that seriously when they’re using, essentially, the same tools and approach of traditional neuroscience.

One need not even go so far as to raise the religious opposition to the concept of physical reductionism. We don’t need go so far as talking about souls. We can simply say that it is likely that consciousness as we know it is as much a function of phenomena at the quantum level as it is the mere three-dimensional biological level. In fact, it seems very likely to me that this is true. So, until a computer can fully model the brain at the quantum level, I’m not sure current models will prove accurate. They’ll be useful, I’m sure, but I imagine they’ll turn on these fully realized models and find that they don’t do what we expect them to do.

I think of it kind of like reverse engineering a movie. You can digitize each frame. Break it down into pixels with color wavelengths. Sample the audio by channel, and map out its waveform. Break it down into its bare minimum components. You can even try to recreate it in another form. But how much are you really learning about it? Are you learning about “movies” or just a specific movie? And could you recreate a new movie based on what you learned by ripping the thing apart? Perhaps. But would anyone watching it recognize it as a movie? Or would it be a complete mash of incomprehensible images and sounds?

Consciousness seems much the same kind of thing to me. We only understand it as it plays out in front of us. Like the movie, we understand it by watching it, not by ripping it into its component parts. That’s not to say we can’t learn quite a bit from this approach, only that I think we’ll never learn enough about consciousness through this approach. We’re still a few orders of magnitude below the necessary understanding of the universe to have anything close to a working model of what makes us what we are.

tags: science, technology, whatever
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So, I’ve been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook for a few months, and have become completely frustrated with it. Enough so that I doubt I’ll play anymore. I could probably rant for hours about the problem, but … well, no. Actually I WILL rant a bit about the problems. With any hope, someone who is working on the game will read this. Fat chance.

Like so many online games, the chief problem is that too much development time is spent on expanding the game than fixing existing problems. It is difficult to speak of the game’s problems without getting into the mechanics of the game, but let’s just say that the player relies on energy, which is spent on jobs. And the game is excessively stingy with energy, particularly after the first 100 levels or so. Strangely enough, it is at this point that some elements of the game become pointless: like money. My character had billions of dollars, and nothing to spend them on.

At this point, the game comes to a screeching halt. The developers throw up roadblocks to attempt to thwart your advance in the game, forcing you to do jobs over and over again in order to gain items you need to finish other jobs. And the payoff is virtually nothing. It becomes frustrating and tedious. So you never really finish, unless you’re a glutton for punishment or obsessive compulsive.

There is, unfortunately, no lack of these types playing the game.

Of course, if you’ve ever played an online game against a band of obsessive compulsives, you know you simply cannot win. I’ve run into the same problem with players on Xbox Live, especially in FPS games. Within a week of a game’s release, they’ll have amassed so many experience points, unlocked all the extras, calculated the optimum weapons loadout in order to decimate their enemies. That’s all well and good, but they make the game miserable for everyone else playing. The same goes with Mafia Wars, where level 3000+ character (I kid you not) come down and beat up on the level 40 noobs, killing any fun they may have been having with the game. This happened to me so often early on, that I very nearly gave up on the game.

The response by the developers has been silence. Basically, they’ve been adding new sections to the game, rehashing the rules, but never fixing the fundamental problems. And as one skips from one area of the game to the next, the advantages accrued by long-term players increase exponentially. New players are saddled with changes to the game rules which cripple them, extending the time necessary to complete the early levels (giving the game more ad views, of course), but exposing them to all sorts of frustrations.

I guess this is inevitable with any game like this, where the model is constantly evolving. It’s like playing Monopoly, only to learn that halfway through the game, suddenly your hotels are worth half their value, and you can only collect when they are landed on with even rolls of the dice. Suddenly you feel cheated: all that work you put into the game has suddenly been erased, and for no good reason.

Any online game requires a good-faith effort on the part of the game-masters to keep the playing field level. New rules are fine if they apply to everyone. But that’s not the case in Mafia Wars. Long-term players are often not effected by the new rules. Old players retain properties, for instance, while new players are denied them. Again, changing the rules sucks the fun out of the game.

One of the more egregious errors was the release of high-level equipment to just about everyone playing the game. So level 20 players suddenly became outfitted with some of the best equipment in the game, erasing all the work other players had put into the game collecting (at some effort) high-level items. Not only did this skew some of the fights in the game, but it obviated a whole subset of game items, making the entire middle section of the game pointless. Pfft.

So, I’m not playing it anymore. I’ve got a bunch of useless digital loot, if anyone wants it.

tags: gaming, whatever
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Cassini continues to provide us with utterly fantastic imagery of Saturn, but nothing quite like this. It is a composite of 75 exposures, stitched together seamlessly. And the actual photo is enormous (28 megapixels), and is apparently so detailed that if you examine it closely, you’ll find several of Saturn’s moons in the shot. Gnarly.

Here’s the small version. If you want to see the fully embiggened photo, click here.

tags: science, whatever
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I wrote this two years ago, with my recollections of 9/11. I’ve fixed a few things, added a few minor comments, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to dwell on it all that much. If you know me, you’ve probably heard the story. If not, give it a read:

I’ve told this story a hundred times, probably, but I’ll tell it again if for no other reason than to refresh my memory so I don’t forget.

I left for work on September 11, 2001, at about 7:20am. I had a five or ten minute walk to the Huntington Metro stop, in Alexandria, Virginia. It was an amazing morning–crisp, clear blue skies. I remember that there were already some leaves changing on the trees–rather earlier than usual. Amy was away on a business trip (Raleigh?).

The rest of the trip to work was uneventful. I sat at my desk, doing some data entry (boring). A colleague of mine entered a little after nine, and mentioned a meeting down on the Hill concerning Sudan. I offered to take photos (mostly just to get out of the office and away from data entry). I grabbed the camera and went down to flag a cab.

It took awhile, which isn’t unusual in DC at that time of day. It was just after 9:30am when I got in the cab. Bad traffic heading south kept the ride slow. The cabbie had the radio on. That was when I first heard of the attack on the World Trade Center. The radio personality (I don’t remember who it was) was talking about how it seemed like an accident until the second plane hit. Just as we crossed the mall, near the Washington Momument (it was 9:40 by the cabbie’s dashboard clock), the radio announced that there were reports of smoke coming from the White House. I, of course, naturally turned around and looked behind me, because while I couldn’t quite see the White House, if there was smoke coming from it, I would have seen. There was no smoke there. But I did see smoke from across the river at the Pentagon, which had been hit just moments before. I almost got out of the cab to take pictures, but refrained. I remember seeing people standing out on the grass, looking out at the Pentagon and pointing. No one really knew what was going on. At this point the radio was full of crazy reports.

I got out of the cab at the Rayburn office building. The first thing I noticed was how many people were on their cell phones. It seemed like everyone. I went through security. They all seemed distracted. Some people were running around. At this point I was convinced that the hearing on Sudan that I was to be attending probably wouldn’t be happening, but I went up to the room all the same, just to be sure. People were milling about, but no meeting (although one was going on across the hallway undisturbed).

The room had two large, flat-panel TVs, both tuned to CNN. That was when I saw the towers on fire for the first time. Most people were sitting, dumbfounded, in their seats. It was dead silent, just the sound of the TVs and the noise of some people moving about. Looking back on it, I realize how disturbing it was to be in a room with so many people with it so damned silent. I’ve been to louder funerals. More reports were coming in, this time of a car bomb down by the White House (a false report, as it turned out). Other reports of hijacked planes, but no confirmation.

At 10am, the South Tower collapsed. It’s hard to describe the reaction of the room, which had about fifty or sixty people in it. Many stood, a few people screamed. Many were crying. I remember a few very young Marines standing by the door crying quietly. I don’t remember much about the next half hour. I just sat there. When the North Tower collapsed at around 10:30am, I decided to get the hell out of there. [Honestly, I don't remember that half hour. I must have just been standing there. I don't know why I didn't leave earlier.] Just outside the door were a few soldiers (heavily armed) going door-to-door telling people to leave the building.

I walked into the hallway. I was obviously not the only one with the idea of leaving. I was in a building just a street away from the Capital Building–it didn’t occur to me until much later how close I was sitting to what could be a major target. I didn’t know my way around the building well, so I followed the crowd. A group of young women, probably no more than 18 years-old, was huddled at the top of the stairs. It was their first day interning on the Hill. They seemed a bit lost, so I pointed them down the stairs.

A little bit of reality hit when I got out onto the street. There were two humvees in the middle of the street, one with a massive machine gun [probably a .50 cal] on top. I turned left (west) to walk back to work. The soldier got in front of me and pointed the opposite direction. I don’t remember what he said (something like “Go!” or “No!”), but he said it in a way that convinced me immediately to turn around and go the other way.

I ended up on New Jersey Ave SE, which was a line of row houses. It was starting to warm up by then and I was getting hot. People had their doors open, offering water and lemonade to the Hill refugees coming from the north. Some had radios out and playing. The occasional fighter jet flew nearby.

I didn’t know what to do. I had no cell phone. The Metro in town was shut down. I was looking at a potential day-long hike back home. Then an odd thing happened–I ran into a professor colleague of mine from Catholic University, who happened to be at the Rayburn Building for a meeting and who had been ushered in the same direction I had. He let me sit in his car for some air conditioning. He went off to chat with some other refugees, and I sat.

Then one of the most disturbing things of the day occurred. It just so happened that I was sitting right across the street from the Washington headquarters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). I got out of the car and walked a little closer. The place looked closed up, but eventually two men came through the door. They were jovial. Laughing. They kept repeating Allahu Akhbar, over and over again as they walked down to their car.

My professor friend offered me a ride home, which took forever. We stopped for food and chatted about what had happened. Neither of us could make sense of it yet, but we seemed to agree that everything had changed. Eventually I made it home. All the outbound long-distance lines were busy, so it was hours before I could get in touch with everyone. I watched the news, until about 4am. But I got up and went to work the next day anyway.

For the next few months, my mornings began with the Metro train blowing through Pentagon station without stopping, and that bitter, acrid smell of burning. [There was something vaguely unsettling about going through a Metro station at full speed, at least that first time. I could almost hear a voice in my head, "Move along. Nothing to see here."] The first few days, people would stop what they were doing and look about awkwardly, as though they should say or do something. I remember a few people crossing themselves. We’d exit the underground tunnel and seeing the Pentagon there, scarred, though thankfully the burned portion was not clearly visible from the train. Eventually the smell faded, and the train began stopping there, though there were armed soldiers waiting right off the train on the platform. Then there were the humvees on street corners near McPherson Square station, right near the White House.

Then the anthrax scare at the post office, and then at the Hart Senate Office Building. My office hosted a meeting there, just weeks before the anthrax attack. I actually got a bad cold a few weeks after the meeting, and a few coworkers couldn’t help but voice, even doubtfully, concerns about contamination. Then months of yellowed, sometimes damaged mail, with that distinctive odor. If the events of 9/11 were the main shock, it was impossible to work in DC without getting smaller shocks over and over again for the next six months.

I had the opportunity to visit Ground Zero in NYC just a month or so after 9/11, while most of the rubble was still there. Amy and I had visited NYC that past June (if I remember correctly), which was an odd trip for us. Normally we wouldn’t have picked a city like New York to visit. We stayed in the hotel right at the base of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attack. It was strange visiting a place again that just four or five months previously had been intact. I suppose these things effect us all in unique ways, but it seems to me that there was, cumulatively, more effect in the daily reminders after the attack than in the attack itself (which I was blessed to have not seen personally). I have no problem remembering how I felt on that day, or the many days after. I wonder if that’s true for everyone?

tags: whatever
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We’re eight years on from that day, and if anything strikes me it is that so many people seem to have forgotten what happened. Of course, for many people it was not the huge event that it seemed to be. They moved on relatively quickly. Having been a little too close to things, I can’t bring myself to forget. I went over my story of the day two years ago. It can be found here. Someday I might go over it and add a few other details I left out (and fix the glaring typos) but today I’m feeling a bit lazy.

If I’d want anyone to think of anything today, it’s that the fight in Afghanistan continues. Michael Yon has been doing fantastic reporting from there (When is he going to get his Pulitzer? It’s long overdue.) and is worth checking out. It is unfortunate that the Iraq war overshadowed Afghanistan, and even more unfortunate that the current administration seems unwilling to finish that fight. A renewed push there like our surge in Iraq could do the job. But there is no political will for it. There are no serious politicians anymore. Am I the only one who notices this? No leaders, just empty suits and weaklings, more in love with themselves and their own voices than anything lasting or sacrificial. Trust me when I say I’m not just talking about the party in power.

What I wouldn’t do for a Churchill right now. The best politicians are principled, obnoxious pricks. If they’re not pissing people off, they’re not doing their jobs. Our politicians piss everyone off, but none of them are the least bit principled.

But now I’ve descended into politics, depressing as it is, and I’ve been doing a good job avoiding that of late. So I let it go. I’ll just say this: most moments in life are ephemeral. They come and go and you forget them. But there are moments that imprint on you indelibly. 9/11 certainly was one of those moments. Will there be a 9/11 in my life when I don’t remember those hectic moments rushing through the streets of DC, trying to figure out what was going on? Or the weeks after, with anthrax in the mail, humvees on the corners with armed Marines? No.

But I’ll also remember the clarity that we had in those days, when all the normal political bullshit was somehow less important. The day-to-day grind of Washington scandal and innuendo subsided, and we all had (I think, at least) a much better grasp of the real priorities. I never felt the “fear” that so many seem to think dominated in those days. I doubt many really were afraid at all. I took one lesson from that day: get your shit in order. My politics changed a bit that day, to be sure. But I think other things did as well. Marking the anniversary of it just makes it all a bit clearer for me.

tags: whatever
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