Electric Josh

Idiots?
A relatively noninflammatory column that got a guy's column cancelled, and actually a pretty well-argued manifesto, not against the war, but against the non-rational, you-must-really-hate-America vitriol from some prowar types. Read up.
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DeLillo
So while we're in a strange mood thinking about the logic of eradicating infidels and other massively bizarre philosophies, it occurs to us that in Mao II (1991!), Don DeLillo wrote this, which I'm unwilling (and too dumb) to break down further. Have fun.

"Where I live, okay, there's a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it's water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island---little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it's all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers."

"Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time."

"I'll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop."

"You'll wonder what made you mad."

"I already have the World Trade Center."

"And it's already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse."

"What?" she said.

"If there was only one tower instead of two."

"You mean they interact. There is a play of light."

"Wouldn't a single tower be much worse?"

"No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it's like a dialogue, only I don't know what they're saying."

"They're saying, 'Have a nice day.' "

"Someday, go walk those streets," she said. "Sick and dying people wath nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?"

...

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"Keep going. I like your anger."

"But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we're giving way to terror, to new of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before---what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear."

Yesterday
Work has lately involved a lot of 90-second pauses while one automated task or another completes, and I've taken to filling the interstitial moments with locating interesting articles that I then have no time to read, because I'm at work, and I got stuff to do. Usually I post such stuff that evening, but last night I bought new running shoes, hung out with my lovely wife, then called my mom instead. Here are a few from the last few days that I finally got around to checking out.

• Interview in The Atlantic with Steven Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam. Good stuff, including an interesting analogy between the Protestant reformation of the Catholic church and the current rise of various puritanical forms of Islam, which brings us to:
• This piece in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend about Sayyid Qatb. At some point in high school I was reading a copy of Cat's Cradle in which someone had left, as a bookmark, part of a printed page of an Arab-sounding rant that, in retrospect, could only have been Qatb. The man wrote well. Someday the arcane spelling choice will be explained; someone overtired doing the transliteration, perhaps?