El Diablo?

“Chavez Says President Bush Is ‘The Devil’” read the headline of a newspaper I held up to the class. Going over to a wall map of the world I said, “Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela, right here. We buy 12% our oil from Venezuela and that country gets rich from our purchases. Chavez was making a speech at the United Nations building in New York City yesterday.”

Looking at students’ faces as I was speaking, I could see that only about half were interested. “As Chavez was speaking at the podium, he sniffed the air and said he smelled sulfur. Why would he say that?” I asked.

No hands. Only blank looks. That’s how it is early in the school year. Few of them have any idea of what is going on in the world beyond school. That would take several weeks to change.

“Sulfur is the stuff on a match tip that flares when you strike it,” I said. “Why would Chavez sniff the air during his speech and say he smelled sulfur?” Still no hands, but a few wrinkled their foreheads as they thought about it. “If Bush is the devil as Chavez claims, where would he live?”

“In hell?” asked a girl nervously.

“Exactly,” I said. “In hell where it’s hot? Matches? Sulfur?”

“Oh, I get it,” she said. Others looked at each other and smiled.

“Chavez called Bush the devil yesterday. Today, he’s giving a press conference in Harlem, a section of New York City.” I turned on the classroom television to see Chavez in a bright read shirt sitting in a church and playing awkwardly with a young girl. He was wearing a bright red shirt.” That’s him, right there,” I said. Soon a black man walked over to him and they hugged. “That’s the actor, Danny Glover,” I said.

“He was in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ right?”

“That’s right.”

“Chavez is also good buddies with Fidel Castro,” I said, “the communist dictator of Cuba.” I walked back over to the wall map and pointed out Cuba. “Chavez says he isn’t a communist, but a socialist,” I explained, “but others claim he is a communist. He’s wearing a red shirt and red is a symbol of communism, but that could just be a coincidence.”

During the first week of school, I passed out a left-right political spectrum chart indicating communists and socialists on the extreme left, Nazis on the extreme right, with Democrats and Republicans on either side of center. Students had to study the chart to determine which political party they agreed with most and which they disagreed with most. Several declared on a test that they disagreed most with the communist party and none agreed with it. That usually changes later in the year when we study communism in more depth. Then, some students think it’s a good thing.

“So, Chavez called President Bush ‘the devil’ or ‘el diablo’ yesterday and he got a lot of applause from representatives of many small nations. What do you think?”

No hands.

“Do you agree with him? Do any of you think President Bush is the devil?” I asked.

Surprisingly, about six students raised their hands. “Why?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t agree with anything he does,” said a girl.

“Okay, you disagree with him. But does that mean he’s the devil?”

“Well, I don’t really think he’s the devil,” she said. “But I’m angry that he started the war in Iraq.”

“Is that what the rest of you think?” I asked.

They nodded.

“So you don’t actually think he’s the devil either?”

They shook their heads.

The following week, Hugo Chavez went back to Venezuela where he was quoted in a local newspaper claiming that the papers he used on the podium at the United Nations were contaminated because President Bush had used the same podium the day before. Chavez was treating his papers with holy water. He also claimed that President Bush had given orders to have him killed. I printed the article and showed it to students. “It appears that Chavez wasn’t just trying to make a point when he claimed Bush is the devil, but actually believes it,” I said.

“He sounds pretty loopy to me,” said a boy. “How does someone like that become president of a country?”

“At first, he used the military to take over the previous government there,” I explained. “Then he was elected by the people of Venezuela several times.”

“Jeez,” said the boy.

Gonads Gone?

There are over a billion Muslims in the world, about one out of five people. Not all are jihadists who want to destroy Israel and the United States, but how many? One percent? Ten percent? Half? Nobody really knows but it’s a very important question. Even if it’s one percent, that’s ten million. When news of September 11th spread around Muslim countries, there was a lot of celebrating in the streets. Were most Muslims glad we were attacked or was there only a small minority celebrating in the streets that day? Is there a “silent majority”? Hard to say.

Some analysts claim our enemies belong to a fast-growing group within Islam variously labelled Islamofascists, Jihadists, Islamists, and so on. President Bush’s strategy is to establish Muslim democracies to give a presumed silent majority voting power. But in Palestine, Muslim voters elected a terrorist group called Hamas to run the Palestine Authority. What will happen in Lebanon’s next election? Will Hezbollah win control? Both groups call for the destruction of Israel and the United States.

Bernard Lewis, America’s foremost historian of the Muslim world, says jihadist, radical Islam was first espoused by an Arab named Wahhab in the 18th century. Wahhab was allied to the House of Saud which eventually conquered Arabia. When oil was discovered there in the early 20th century, the Saudis gained power and so did Wahhabism by association. Our petrodollars fund its propagation. Last April, Lewis said Wahhabism is to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. If he’s right and I hope he is, jihadist Islam will be bothersome for a time, but fade away to the wacky fringe as the Klan has but I’m not confident it will.

The KKK got fairly strong in the south after the Civil War and spread north a few decades later. Mainstream Christian leaders, however, publicly condemned it. Ordinary Christians were horrified by KKK terror tactics and said so openly. Yet I’m hearing very little condemnation of Jihadist terror from Muslim clerics or Muslims in general. Instead, we see them burning American flags, Israeli flags and Danish flags. They jump around, yell, shake their fists, burn President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI in effigy, behead captives and blow themselves up to kill infidels all over the world. In European cities, Muslim minorities demonstrate with signs exclaiming: “Behead Those Who Insult Islam” and “Kill Those Who Insult Islam.” Now they want to kill the pope.

I’ve learned a lot from Bernard Lewis but I have to ask myself: was he downplaying Jihadist strength? He made the KKK comparison in April, but by August he was warning that mad Muslim mullahs who control Iran might try to trigger an Apocalypse on the 22nd of the month. They didn’t, thank God, but Lewis got me nervous and I listened to the news more closely that day than usual.

Lewis’s 1990 essay in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Roots of Muslim Rage” first opened America’s eyes about what motivates jihadists who have since become a threat to civilization itself. Jihadists blame the decline of a once-great Arab/Muslim civilization on western oppression. To regain power, they would impose a purified, 8th-century brand of Islam on themselves and everyone else. They would return to the beginnings if Islam and that’s what al Qaeda means: “The Source.” Then they would rise up again to smash the west and Christianity as they did fourteen hundred years ago.

How many Muslims are (take your pick) Jihadists? Islamofascists? Wahhabis? Radical Islamists? We don’t know, but it doesn’t take a majority in any given country or region to turn things completely around. Nazis were a minority in 1920s Germany but they took over in the 1930s. The Bolsheviks were a minority in 1917 Russia, but they controlled the Soviet Union a few years later.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans understood the threat and were ready to do whatever it took to destroy our enemies. Roosevelt demanded nothing short of unconditional surrender and we smashed the fascists in less than four years. Then we fought a cold war for more than forty years to defeat Communism. Do we still have what it takes to defeat the Jihadists? I’m not so sure. We have the strength, certainly, but lack the will. We’re afraid to offend them, much less destroy them. Two generations ago, we summoned the will and the courage to fight. Now it seems our national gonads are gone.

For decades, Muslim terrorists called for the destruction of America and we ignored them. Even after we suffered a worse attack than Pearl Harbor, we still don’t have the will to destroy our enemies. Many insist Islam is a religion of peace and our only enemy is Osama Bin Laden. However, Islam means “submission.” Will we submit? Iran will soon have nuclear weapons and its president threatens to wipe Israel off the map while his proxy army, Hezbollah, chants “Death to America.” Meanwhile, Americans are more worried about global warming than jihadists with nukes. Have we lost our minds along with our gonads?

Editors Decide

On the first day of school I outlined what students would be learning, how they would be graded, and explained that current events were an important part of the curriculum. We would be covering stories in three newspapers each day.

“Editors decide what the biggest story is and put it in the headline above the fold,” I said, holding up the Sun Journal headline about three bodies discovered in Newry, Maine. “Why do you suppose this is the headline?” I asked.

No responses. That was not unusual for the first day and there were only a few minutes left. “Reading on, I see that all three bodies were women and they were murdered. Newry is a small town just north of Bethel and very similar to your town. A triple murder is big news, don’t you think?”

Some students nodded, but the others just stared at me shyly. It was time to move on to their next class and I dismissed them saying, “We’ll see what’s in the headlines tomorrow.”

The story got a lot more attention the next day and I picked up five daily newspapers at Jockey Cap Store before school. I held up the Sun Journal again and there were bold, big-font headlines about a quadruple homicide above a large, color photograph of the man arrested. He was doing the perp walk from the Oxford County Jail to the Oxford County Courthouse. A deputy held him by the arm. I explained that he had confessed to the murders and that three victims were dismembered. After giving them a little time to react to that disturbing detail, I told them that I didn’t want to discuss the murders, but analyze different ways media covered them. “Why do you think the editor chose this picture?” I asked the class. “There would have been dozens of others to choose from.”

Again, no answers.

I held up the Portland Press Herald, which also displayed above-the-fold headlines and a large, color photo. “Why did the editors of this paper choose a different photo?” I asked.

They looked at it for a few seconds before a couple of hands went up. “Because he’s smiling,” said a boy.

“Why is he smiling?” a girl asked.

“Good question,” I said.

“Is he crazy?” asked another student.

“Of course he’s crazy,” said another. “He’d have to be to do what he did.”

“That’s creepy,” said the girl.

“Do you think that’s why the editors choose this picture?” I asked. “Did they want to creep out readers?”

“I guess so,” she said.

“Definitely,” said a boy.

“These two papers were side-by-side on the rack over at Jockey Cap Store,” I said. “Which one would people be more likely to buy?”

“The one that shows him smiling,” said the boy.

“Why?”

“Because it’s scary,” he said.

“Do people like to get scared?” I asked.

Several nodded. “Some do,” said a boy.

“Do editors think about that when they’re choosing what photos to run?”

“Probably,” said a girl.

I held up the Boston Globe. “This paper, which has ten times the circulation of the other two, ran the story on the front page but below the fold. Why did they decide it was less important than the two Maine papers?”

“Because Boston is far away?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But people down there are familiar with Newry and Bethel because they come up here on vacations. Most of the skiers at Sunday River are from Massachusetts, aren’t they? The Globe’s editors know this, so they put the story on the front page but below the fold.”

Next, I held up The Boston Herald. The entire front page was taken up with a different photo of the confessed killer. “Why did the Herald’s editors choose this picture?” I asked.

“Because the killer is looking right at the camera in that one,” said a boy.

“So when you look at the guy, he seems to be looking right back at you,” I added. Students stared the photo more closely. “Do you think I’m reading too much into this?” I asked. “Or do you think editors really consider this stuff when they’re deciding what to put on the front page?” I held up three papers for them to see side-by-side. Nobody responded.

“Since you’re not answering, I’ll just tell you that editors think a lot about what stories and photos go on the front page, and which ones don’t. People in media are making decisions all the time about how you see what you see. They also decide what you don’t see. Remember that.”

White Guilt

There it was again on the second day of pre-school teacher workshops. The principal passed out results of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) testing were segregated according to how “African Americans” and “Pacific Islanders” performed. My school didn’t request that data be broken down this way. It’s our federal government which is obsessed with race.

Some may object to my use of the word “segregate” in this case, but it fits. Once again, our federal government is discriminating on the basis of race - something it’s supposed to outlaw. Usually there are many more racial categories like Hispanic, Asian, Eskimo, Native American, and so on. If as a country we really believe there are no other differences between people with different skin tones, why do we keep this up? What if test results showed some races doing better or worse than others? Would government then require special programs for students of one race and not another? Is this what we should be doing? Is it racist?

Some would be appalled that I would even ask the question. “Of course it isn’t racist,” they think. “We’re only trying to help.” They support affirmative action programs and the like, to give minorities a “leg up” over members of the majority race - whites, in the case of the United States. They’re blind to the condescension inherent in such programs. They think they’re atoning for the sins of history for which they feel guilty, though they were born after slavery and discrimination were outlawed and virtually eliminated.

White guilt is a major force - not just here in the United States, but worldwide. In the 1860s and the 1960s it was a force for good. Slavery was abolished in the 1860s after the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s finished the job a hundred years later. White guilt is still with us, but now it’s making us all sick - not just white people, but nonwhite people whom white saviors purport to help. Guilt-ridden whites cannot perceive the racial insult inherent in their firm belief that minorities could never make it on a level playing field without the boost of racial quotas.

Last week we were bombarded with reports like “Katrina - One Year After.” The should-have-been-former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin appeared on top-rated radio and television shows like “60 Minutes” and “Meet The Press” and continued to suggest that our federal government discriminated against the “chocolate” people of New Orleans (as Nagin calls them), by delaying emergency aid. If New Orleans had been majority white, Nagin keeps claiming, the federal response would have been quicker and fewer black people would have died. His claims are ridiculous of course, but the media continued to give them the most extensive coverage. White guilt. And Nagin continues to dodge questions about why he failed to evacuate his city after getting plenty of advance warning, even when shown pictures of the rows of drowned school busses he was supposed to use. If the voters of New Orleans reelected him after all that, they deserve him. That he’s still mayor is a strong argument that a lot of people in New Orleans are beyond help.

What else but white guilt is responsible for the decades-long obsession with bussing white and black students past their neighborhood schools and across town long after everyone concerned realized there is nothing to be gained by doing so? Though it has certainly increased racial tension, has achieving “racial balance” had any benefit at all? Evidence simply isn’t there.

“White Guilt” happens to be the title of a recent book by Shelby Steele. After many essays and articles on the subject, Steele makes a strong case that his fellow blacks become dysfunctional when they continually blame severe social and economic problems on white racism and not on their own behaviors. Trying to blame your problems on someone else is a common human tendency, but white guilt has enabled it to grow to the point where it’s the biggest obstacle to progress in the black community.

Steele’s book was not a surprise, coming sixteen years after “Content of Our Character,” in which he first questioned racial set-aside programs allegedly benefiting blacks. More surprising is the most recent book by Juan Williams entitled: “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It.” Williams echoes many of Steele’s themes. Remember, Williams co-authored “Eyes on the Prize” with Julian Bond and works for NPR.

Though he wasn’t the first prominent black man to question things, I guess it was Bill Cosby who really blew the lid off. Two years ago, he made a speech to Operation PUSH in Jesse Jackson’s back yard, saying: “It is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us, and it keeps a person frozen in their seat. It keeps you frozen in your hole that you are sitting in to point up and say, ‘That’s the reason why I am here.’ We need to stop this.”

We can all do our part to “stop this.” The next time you’re asked to put a checkmark in a box next to a racial category, draw your own box, print “HUMAN” next to it and put your checkmark there. If enough of us do that, maybe government will finally get the message.

Feeling Small

Used to be the lawn didn’t grow much in August, but this year is different. There’s so much water in the ground that it still needs mowing every week. The field below it has to be mowed once a year and that requires an industrial-strength mower called a bush hog. Last week, I rented one that you sometimes see advertised on TV. It’s a walk-behind unit, not the kind that is attached to the back of a farm tractor. It’s self-propelled, sort of, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel. Turning the thing around at the end of a pass again and again requires more strength and endurance than is left in my 55-year-old body. It’s a two-acre field on the side of Christian Hill and it’s too steep to go side to side, so I had to walk up and down a hundred times behind the machine and hold on to it as it climbed over and chopped up various plants which had grown as tall as I am. Even with numerous breaks to catch my breath, it took a month off the end of my life to finish.

It’s the field’s second incarnation. A farmer named McDaniels created it a century and a half ago. He cleared it and rolled stones down the hill into a wall. Some were too big, so he drilled and split them into smaller, irregularly-shaped pieces that he maneuvered into place on the wall. He must have run out of energy too because he left two big rocks only partially split. Then he planted apple trees. I don’t know how long he worked the apple orchard but eventually he or someone else abandoned it to the forest. By the time I purchased the property it was all woods again. Among the oaks, ashes maples, and birches a few skeletons of long-dead apple trees remained between the stone walls. It took me about a decade to clear it again, cutting trees and burning brush. Many times I sat on one of the walls McDaniels made and wiped sweat from my face as I looked over my work. I imagined that he must have sat there and done the same generations ago. Eventually I hired someone to stump it with an excavator and replant it into a field.

As it would have for McDaniels, the field provides me a marvelous view to the west and I never tire of watching sunsets over Kearsarge in the spring and Baldface in the summer. On clear days, I can see smoke from the cog railway on Mount Washington. Having trekked up and down those mountains I know how massive they are, but when I’m over there and looking back east toward my property on Christian Hill, I can barely make out the hill, much less my field or my house. It helps me realize that my years of hard work are nearly invisible in the grand scheme of things. The hills and mountains are hundreds of millions of years old and my time on them is not much more than the brief, dim glow from a firefly’s butt. Humility is a good thing and I have much to be humble about. If I should forget, someone or something will usually remind me. It might be my wife. It might be a letter to the editor.

All that remained of McDaniels’ work were a few stone walls hidden by woods. I cleared the trees just as he did and constructed a few smaller walls with the help of a friend. Hopefully, they’ll last as long as his. McDaniels also carved his initials on a granite boundary marker nearby. On the other side of Christian Hill, there may someday be a stone with my name engraved in the Number Four Cemetery and somebody else will probably mow around it, for a while anyway.

Though I can see a long way toward large mountains in New Hampshire, I remind myself that what appears a panorama to me is but a tiny sliver of earth’s surface and earth is a tiny speck in the universe. When George Bailey had similarly insignificant feelings about his place and time here in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel visited to convince him otherwise. I haven’t seen any angels lately and I’m mostly glad I have so little influence on events around me. If it were otherwise, I’d have to take more responsibility for what happens on this planet.

Matthew’s gospel says God knows when a sparrow falls. I’m also aware that He created the hawk and house cat which can hasten the sparrow’s demise. The passage goes on to say that God counts the hairs on my head. It’s also true that He’s making His job easier lately by expanding my bald spot.

Then there’s my philosopher friend, Kevin, who tells me: “Always remember Tom, that you’re unique - just like everyone else.”

Confused and Divided

This is a confusing war. Few of us are sure who or what we’re fighting. Are we at war with terror? Terror is a thing - an extreme fear - and that’s what our leaders say we’re fighting. I suppose we humans are always fighting fear of one kind or another, but an organized war against a thing? Our Constitution says Congress has sole power to declare war and the president sole power to carry it out as commander-in-chief. Did Congress declare war on a thing?

Maybe some Americans believe we’re fighting a thing but I doubt it. If they think about it, they must consider who is using terror against us. We’re divided according to how we answer three essential questions: Who are the terrorists? Why are they attacking us? How should we respond?

First, who is attacking us? Some say it’s al Qaida because they’re the only ones who attacked us on September 11th. Others say it’s not just them but other Arab Muslim terrorist organizations as well such as Hezbollah, who have killed hundreds of Americans and were most recently at war with Israel. Still others say it’s not just Arab Muslim terrorists, but all Muslim terrorists including Iranians (who are not Arab but Persian), Indonesians, Filipinos, Pakistanis and several other kinds of Muslims as well. The only commonality is that they’re all Muslims, which means that they’re all followers of Islam. These Americans believe we’re fighting a newly-resurgent form of Radical Islam followed by many Muslims from all ethnic groups. Not all Muslims are terrorists, they say, but all terrorists are Muslims.

Secondly, why are they attacking us? Some Americans think it’s because we deserve it. Former University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill commented on September 11th, saying: “Why did it take Arabs to do what we here should have done a long time ago?” He called September 11th victims “little Eichmans,” as if were they who want to kill Jews and not the Muslims who attacked us - who compare Jews to dogs and pigs. Other professors said similarly outrageous things and were defended by still other professors who claimed they were not traitors, but only exercising academic freedom.

Other Americans think we didn’t deserve September 11th, but think we oppress Muslims, steal their oil, support Israel, and all this angers them enough to attack us. They think America is controlled by big corporations who steal natural resources from third-world nations everywhere and the world hates us for it.

Other Americans were shocked by the 9-11 attack and have been trying since to figure out why Muslims hate us, but they aren’t sure yet.

Still others think Radical Muslims hate us and want to kill us because we’re not Muslims, because we don’t want to convert to Islam, and because we’re their biggest obstacle to taking over the world and making it Muslim. After the conquest, they think, ruling caliphs would impose Islamic law called Sharia, make men grow beards, make women wear burkhas, then kill fornicators and homosexuals. They think we’re evil, the Great Satan.

Finally, how should we respond? Those who think we deserved to be attacked suggest that we cooperate in our own demise. They’d like to see America as we know it collapse. Others who think we didn’t deserve such a harsh attack believe a measured response is warranted, and we should have limited our counterattack to Afghanistan. They see the Iraq war as going too far and making Muslims even more angry at us. They think we should put it all behind us now, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and move on.

Others of us think we’re not going far enough - that our limited war and measured responses give our enemies the impression that we’re not willing to do whatever it takes to win - that this strategy encourages our enemies who will hold out against us for now, then step up their attacks as our resolve weakens. These Americans think we should go all out - destroy Radical Islam by hunting down and killing terrorists while taking out the governments of any countries that supports terrorists, such as Syria and Iraq. They believe in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes even though Bush himself seems to have abandoned it. Many have relatives on the front lines and display yellow ribbons on their vehicles.

Fewer than half of eligible Americans will actually vote in ten weeks. Meanwhile, senators and congressmen travel around their districts appealing to as many groups as possible. As Senator Lieberman discovered, this war, however we understand it, is issue number one. Most of us will still be confused about it after the election - unless we’re attacked again. That would focus our minds.

News Control is Mind Control

There are parallels between the Vietnam War and our war with Islamofascists today, but not the ones our mainstream media look for. The first is media’s willingness to be manipulated by our enemies. The other is the fallacy of fighting a limited, prolonged conflict. When we don’t go all out, we’re at the mercy of the pampered, blame-America-first types who dominated our press corps then, as now, and who report only quagmire from their hotel rooms.

Teaching Vietnam as part of my 20th century US History course, I use PBS’s “Vietnam: A Television History,” a ten-hour series produced by Stanley Karnow in 1983. Karnow interviewed Viet Cong veterans after the war who boasted about setting mines and booby traps around villages, about shooting at US soldiers from civilian homes, then escaping through tunnels into surrounding jungle. They considered themselves heroes for hiding behind civilians and then sneaking away to let villagers suffer the retaliation they deserved. Karnow played television footage of burning villages and peasant wailing, the footage Americans back home watched almost every night on the evening news.

Reports from the Middle East today are similar. Al Qaida terrorists use Iraqi and Afghan homes and villages as bases to attack American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, then hide out in populated areas. American viewers see wrecked homes and women and children crying. Hezbollah terrorists shoot rockets into Israel from civilian homes in Lebanon, then let civilians suffer retaliation. Our media films the suffering while ignoring the cowardly tactics causing it. Reuters uses doctored photographs exaggerating civilian damage and deaths until US bloggers expose them. Vietnam is a blueprint for media coverage in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Lebanon: Exaggerate whatever suggests quagmire and ignore what may indicate progress.

After an all-out attack on American bases during the Tet “truce” in 1968, the Viet Cong and NVA were soundly defeated. Their defeat, however, was portrayed as a victory by our media. An account in Wikipedia describes it well: “Following [CBS anchor Walter] Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’ Soon after Cronkite’s report, Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race.”

When Vietnamese village leaders resisted communism, the Viet Cong tied them up and cut off their heads in front of villagers. Radical Islamic terrorists kidnap Americans and Iraqis who cooperate with the US-backed government and behead them on videotape for internet broadcast. American reporter Daniel Pearl got his head cut off because he was Jewish and wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal.

Mainstream media is unscathed so far. CNN voluntarily censored its broadcasts from Iraq under Saddam so they could remain in Baghdad. Walter Cronkite’s CBS successor Dan Rather fawningly interviewed Saddam Hussein. CBS’s allegedly tough journalist Mike Wallace obsequiously interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Earlier this week, however, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a reporter and a cameraman for conservative Fox News. Will they be decapitated too?

How many times have American TV cameras filmed Muslims burning American flags and stomping on them? Dozens? Hundreds? Are they staged for the cameras? Why are the signs in English? The role media played in Vietnam is well understood by Radical Muslim terrorists today. They know their enemy but we don’t know ours. They play our media like a fiddle.

News control is mind control. It’s power. Whoever wields it decides what people see or don’t see, what they hear or don’t hear - what they think. In a democracy, people vote accordingly. Perception is reality and media controls perception in war. Limited, protracted wars like those in Vietnam and the Middle East are most vulnerable to media influence. If we’re going to fight, go all out or don’t go at all.

Former students who became soldiers are appalled by mainstream media coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. “All they show are the negatives. They ignore good things we do,” is a typical comment. By “mainstream media,” I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. I also mean the “Alphabet Networks” like ABC, CBS and NBC as well as newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek. Although their power is diminishing with competition from talk radio, weblogs and cable news like Fox, the mainstream media still have control over what most Americans know.

MSM journalists believe they were responsible for US forces leaving Vietnam and they’re right. However, they don’t believe they’re responsible for the consequences - millions of Vietnamese boat people and millions of dead Cambodians in the killing fields. If history is any guide, MSM coverage of today’s war may result in the premature pullout of American forces from the Middle East just as it did in Vietnam. Consequences for that will be more September 11s - or worse. The Viet Cong didn’t follow us home. Islamofascists will. They’re already here.

Backcountry History

People don’t like to see ATVs coming. The very first time I climbed onto one - my brother’s - an angry land owner waved me down before I’d gone a mile. His wife and daughter came out too and explained how 4-wheelers had raced by his house and trespassed on his property. After he recognized me as the guy in the newspaper who likes to explore old roads, cellar holes and cemeteries, he let me through, but I learned that ATV riders before me had given the machines a bad reputation.

Last spring I bought my own 4-wheeler and I’ve explored much more country than I ever could on foot or in my truck. I’m discovering a lot of old roads, cemeteries, neighborhoods, mines and gravel pits. This probably doesn’t sound like fun for most people, but I’m a history geek and this is how I get my jollies when I’m not teaching.

Before venturing into an area, I study maps, starting with the most recent - usually the DeLorme Street Atlas. From that, I go to USGS (United States Geological Survey) maps, which are the most detailed. These can be purchased from the State of Maine for $5 per quadrangle. Some are updated within the past ten years and others - like the one for my own town of Lovell - go back to 1962. They depict topographic features like elevation, swamps, ponds and lakes, but also fields, woods, orchards, and even buildings. The University of New Hampshire has historic USGS maps available online from the early 20th century for all of New England and New York state. Most towns are depicted in the 1940s and some in the first decade of the 20th century. From Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg, I’ve purchased mid-19th century maps of every town in Maine and New Hampshire arranged by county. Most recently, I purchased maps of the towns within a 30-mile radius from the Oxford County Atlas of 1880. All these early maps show family surnames of people who lived in every area of town, as well as churches, schoolhouses, saw mills, grist mills, fulling mills, stave mills and cemeteries. From these, I can determine what areas of a given town were once settled and are now abandoned. Studying a succession of USGS maps I can determine when the old settlements were reforested after the descendants of early settlers stopped farming them and moved westward after the Civil War.

Most of the old roads still exist as rugged trails and, if they’re not closed off by the present owners, I can explore them. Some have wires across and others are barred by elaborate gates. Many will have “keep out” signs specifically aimed at 4-wheelers. They let in snowmobilers, but not ATVs and I guess that’s because so many inconsiderate riders have dug up the ground by spinning tires or other reckless behavior. I’ll see a lot of this in gravel pits which interest me because I like to examine layers of sand, clay, gravel and stones deposited by glaciers from 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago. During that time span glaciers came and went at least four times. Maps of glacial activity are available from The Maine Geological Survey in Augusta and I’ve purchased several (called “Surficial Geology” maps) for only $5 apiece. Conveniently, they correspond to USGS quadrangle maps. More detailed geological descriptions are available on each quadrangle for an additional $5. Going back even further in history is a bedrock geology map of the whole state depicting what kinds of rocks and fault lines underlie the glacial sediment we all walk on. Bedrock is exposed in several places like cliff faces, hill tops, mines and road cuts. When I pull over and study these, I’m looking hundreds of millions of years into the past when Maine was attached to northwest Africa - long before there were any humans on earth.

Last weekend, I spent an entire day exploring in Greenwood, Maine. The western half of the town is bisected north to south by an abandoned road that is open to ATVs. There are numerous mines to see as well as settlements. Few parts of west Greenwood ever had electricity and there are very few buildings left standing - mostly hunting camps and a scattering of original homes now used seasonally. I found cemeteries miles from any paved roads and containing veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. These guys cut roads into steep hillsides, built homes and barns with elaborate foundations, cleared land, and died. Their descendants buried them and then moved on to do similar things in America’s west.

Lately I’m realizing that even with my new 4-wheeler, I won’t likely have time to explore all the abandoned places in just my part of Maine before I’m buried under one of those stones myself, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

It's Our War Too

On a tour of Israel in May of 2000, my wife called me from the northern city of Tiberias. Minutes before, I watched reports on the “Newshour” of Hezbollah rocket attacks and I asked her if she’d seen anything. “No,” she said, “but I can hear explosions in the distance.” We have reservations for another trip in October but it’s been postponed to May - too many rockets hitting along the itinerary.

Cowardly Hezbollah terrorists hide rocket launchers among civilians. They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the civilian population as Israel counterattacks. When Israel was attacked openly, it finished off invading armies in short order. In 1967 it took six days. Muslim Arab countries staged four open attacks on Israel - 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Each time, their forces were annihilated by tiny Israel. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen - various combinations of which attacked in each of the four wars - were humiliated. After the fourth consecutive rout they learned Israel would not be defeated in open combat, so they resorted to terrorism and economic blackmail.

Following the 1973 war, the Arab oil embargo caused major damage to our economy. People my age remember gas lines, inflation, and skyrocketing interest rates. Then terrorism increased. Even before Israel became a country in 1948, Jews endured decades of vile attacks on civilian settlements in Palestine. Between the wars, Israel was continuously hit by artillery and rockets from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt and they continued after 1973. During Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel and financed Palestinian suicide attacks for years after, sending $25,000 to the family of each jihadist suicide bomber.

Hatred of Israel is a unifying force for Muslims. Shiites and Sunnis who have been killing each other for centuries will work together to attack Jews. With the rise of Radical Islam they work together to kill Americans as well.

Radical Islam comes in two basic forms:

The Shiite version dates from the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s and continues in Iran under the mullahs. To them, we are “The Great Satan.” With their petrodollars, Shiite Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon and in other countries around the world. They’ve murdered hundreds of Americans as well as Israelis.

The Sunni version takes the form of Wahhabism which originated in Arabia in the mid-1700s and got stronger by its association with the House of Saud and the oil revenues of Saudi Arabia. The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda are incarnations of Radical Sunni Islam. Shiite and Sunni radicals cooperate in attacks on Israel and the United States, as well as India, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, etc.

Though some of us knew it already, all Americans learned they were targets of Radical Islam on September 11th. Since then, however, the Democrat Party and their mainstream media mouthpieces have persuaded many that only al Qaeda is our enemy - not Hezbollah, not Saddam Hussein, not Iran, not Syria. They couldn’t be more wrong. A parade in Tehran, Iran September 22, 2003 displayed missiles draped with banners proclaiming: “Israel should be wiped off the map” and “We will trample America under our feet,” “Death to America,” and “Death to Israel.”

At a rally last year, Sheik Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah in Lebanon, shouted, “Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’” Tens of thousands of his followers shouted, “Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!”

Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command appeared on al Jazeera last Saturday. Ayman al-Zawahiri said al Qaeda will not stand idle while Israelis “burn the Muslim brothers in Gaza and in Lebanon.” With a poster of the burning World Trade Center behind him, he continued saying “All the world is a battlefield open in front of us.”

Last week, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked if President Bush believes current fighting between Israel and Lebanon “is as much the United States’ war as it is Israel’s war.”

“No,” he said and my heart sank.

President Bush is going wobbly on us. Immediately following September 11th, he said the United States would go after terrorists and the countries supporting them. Now, Iran and Syria are calling his bluff and he’s folding. Instead of pressing for a cease fire he should let Israel destroy Hezbollah, then give them bunker busters to drop on Assad’s palace in Damascus. If Iran responds openly to that as they threaten to, bring it on. Get it out in the open again.

As the reporter suggested in his question to Snow, it’s as much our war as it is Israel’s. Our only choices are: 1. We fight it over there or over here. 2. We fight a non-nuclear Iran now or a nuclear Iran later.

We can postpone our trip again if necessary, but if I were a young man with a determined commander-in-chief, I’d go there in a uniform with a weapon.

Sick Water

It was a beautiful lake if you looked at it from a distance. There were fields sloping down to the water’s edge on the far shore and rolling hills visible beyond. Several nicely-built homes dotted other stretches of waterfront but the lake was dying.

This wasn’t what I expected to find. Exploring back roads on the other side of Lewiston last week, I’d picked up a sandwich and pulled over to a sandy beach on Sabattus Pond next to Route 126. It was a humid ninety degrees and one would expect the beach to be packed with cars, children and mothers on beach chairs; but it wasn’t. Mine was the only car and the only life in evidence was a couple of crows hopping along past the occasional soda can or discarded food wrapper. Further down was a boarded-up old bath house. This was mid-July, the height of Maine’s summer, and the beach looked like a moonscape. I got out, walked to the water’s edge, and looked down. The lake was almost opaque in a yellowish green haze, a kind of thinned-out pea soup. Depressing.

Sabattus Pond is a misnomer. It’s big enough to be a lake and that makes its impending death more tragic. I had questions - like when did the lake get sick, for instance, so I checked out my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found a boat landing along the western shore. Two guys were backing up a trailer to a floating bass boat and I asked one how long the water had been like this. He’d only been around about six years, he said, and the algae blooms occurred every year. He’d heard there was a chicken farm on a river flowing into the lake that had fouled it. “Killed it,” was more accurate I thought. Looking at the atlas again, I noticed one of the in-flowing rivers was aptly named - the Dead River. “The bass fishing is good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t dare eat any of them.”

Further along the Sawyer Road next to the eastern edge of Sabattus Pond, there were smaller roads leading to the shore. Exploring these, I noticed cottages with water frontage in fairly good repair, but on the inland side of the roads many were not maintained. Quite a few displayed overgrown lawns, rusty old “For Sale” signs, and generalized disrepair. Some appeared outright abandoned. It was depressing.

As I crossed the town line from Sabattus into Greene, the road moved away from the shore and properties were typical of rural Maine - some were kept up and others neglected. At the top of a hill was a beautiful farm with meticulously managed grounds. Next to it was a handsome stone building called the Sawyer Memorial, but its parking lot hadn’t been used for a while and I wondered why. There was grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. On the other side of the road I was surprised to see dozens of big old post-WWII army trucks parked in rows. I wondered what were they doing on a horse farm. A mile further on was a huge, fenced-in area containing several hundred old trucks painted in green camouflage. Researching online later, I learned they were M813, 5-ton, army vehicles manufactured in the 1980s. This compound looked deserted also. Tall grass growing up around them indicated the trucks hadn’t moved in a while. In my gloomy mood, the endless rows of metal and rubber seemed a huge waste.

Further along, I came to an old cemetery in the town of Wales. Gravestones dating back to the early 1800s had been pushed over and several were broken. Obelisks were toppled and though the grass had been mowed, no one had seen fit to repair the damage. The scene depressed me even further. Veterans of every conflict since the Civil War were buried there and I wondered who would wish to dishonor the graves of patriots. Was it an antiwar protest? Mindless vandalism by purposeless young men with nothing else to do? I couldn’t tell. Neither could I decide which would be worse.

A bit further on, the lake was back in view and I looked down across rolling hay fields to the sparkling water. Had I not stood on its shore, I wouldn’t have known it was dying. It was still beautiful from high up, reflecting the sun back to me, but its condition was critical. My circumnavigation showed not a single person swimming in it. Could the lake be flushed out and brought back to life? If so, what would it take? I thought of Kezar Lake in my own town. Its waters are still pure and I realized how important it is to keep them that way.

Sabattus Pond is dying. I strongly suspect, after my two-hour tour around it, that the economic and social health of the three communities on its shores is also suffering as a direct result.

The Eyes Have It

“I care more and more about less and less,” said the old man.

He’d just recovered from two brushes with death, each requiring major surgery and I had asked him how he was feeling. That was his answer. He looked me in the eye and waited for me to respond. For several seconds I thought about it and then asked him what he meant. “The number of things that concern me has narrowed as I get older,” he explained, “but I care more about those things than I used to.”

I understood that. He’d chosen his words carefully. He continued to look at me and I could see in his eyes that he was okay. He’d accepted that he would die sooner or later and probably sooner, but he didn’t seem anxious about it. He was a religious man and he’d had many heartaches in his long life. He was no stranger to suffering - physical, emotional and spiritual. We were friends because he let me know him and I wondered if our friendship was one of the things he still cared about. I didn’t ask, but I believe it was. We had discussed much about what troubled us and what made us happy, but words were not the only way we communicated. Silent eye contact said a great deal. He didn’t look away when we talked or when we paused and I could see no guile in his eyes. There’s wisdom in that old Yiddish proverb: “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” and also in the quote from Emerson: “The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.” The old man had lived through a long life with many hills and valleys and swamps. He didn’t look forward to dying, but there was no fear in his eyes.

When I was a young man, death was part of my job. My college classes were all in the morning and I worked a 3-11 shift every night at a geriatric hospital where people didn’t get better and go home. They went there to die and if they had their marbles, they knew it. As an orderly, I fed them, cleaned them up when they soiled themselves, put them to bed at night, and brought them down to the morgue when they died. During my two-and-a-half years there, many dozens died on my shift. I cleaned their bodies, tied on their toe tags, wrapped them in their shrouds, lifted them onto the stretcher and brought them down to the “cooler” from which the undertakers would pick them up. Most didn’t go gracefully, but some did and I’ll always remember those. Often I could tell how they would deal with their deaths by looking in their eyes.

Some people I’ve been acquainted with for years don’t let me know them. They guard their eyes in various ways, and they have a repertoire of personas they put on and take off like a set of clothes, only more quickly. Whatever is real under all that I never see. Maybe I wouldn’t want to if I could. G. K. Chesterton said, “There’s a road from eye to heart that does not go through the intellect,” but for these people, that road is blocked. Some block it on purpose; some aren’t even aware.

Other people let me know them. After we get friendly, a few will confide that I made them nervous by the way I looked at them when we first met. They were intimidated. That surprised me at first; then it started to bother me because I didn’t intend to make them uncomfortable. Lately though, I’m coming to accept it. I’m just not very good at small talk and I don’t often engage in it. If there’s nothing to say, I prefer to look and listen silently to people, and that makes some of them nervous. Sometimes my mind will wander while I’m trying to listen. That’s rude, I know, but I can’t help it. If I think of it, I’ll smile more when I’m looking at someone to try and soften whatever their impression might be, but only if it’s a real smile. I don’t want to fake it. Life is too short for pretense.

Familiarity with death isn’t morbid. Awareness of death can enrich life. One of life’s few certainties is that we all die. It’s just a matter of how and when. Though I can’t say for sure, I believe there are worse things than death and a meaningless life is probably one of them. We humans need to believe in something greater than ourselves. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Music, Politics and Culture

There were few if any country music stations where I grew up in suburban Boston. Nobody I knew wore cowboy hats. My musical tastes were heavily influenced by my peer group. It was rock and roll, folk music and protest songs we listened to in the car and at dances. Later, at college, it was more of the same.

My first exposure to country music was after my best friend Philip quit high school, joined the army, and went to Vietnam. When he returned, he had developed a taste for Johnny Cash and other country singers. He was almost embarrassed to tell me because it wasn’t considered cool to like that kind of music. I wasn’t confident enough to withstand criticism of my peer group in those days, so I resisted listening to country music if anyone else was around, but I kind of liked Johnny Cash too.

My college friends believed it really was possible to put an end to war for all time and their musical tastes reflected that. The lyrics condemned war and capitalism while extolling pacifism and socialism. Country music seemed its polar opposite, producing songs with lyrics like: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. We don’t take our trips on LSD.” Singer/songwriter Merle Haggard actually did smoke marijuana - maybe not in Muskogee, but certainly in several other venues. He said he wrote the song to describe how his long-dead father would have looked at the 1960s.

Country music celebrated patriotism, family, God, and other traditional American values. Aficionados understood that the necessity for a strong military defense was constant. The idea that there was anything shameful in our military heritage was completely foreign to them. Just as it would always be necessary to defend oneself against bullies on the playground, it would always be necessary to defend our country from threat of invasion or takeover. Such was the human condition. Views like that were horrifying to people at the colleges I went to.

The boy meets girl theme was also common in country music but it was always monogamous. As Haggard sang: “We don’t make a party out of lovin’.” It wasn’t Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” No. Country music fans saw that as cheating. If someone strayed, country singers wailed sadly over the heartbreak that always came with it.

A condescending view toward country music prevailed where I grew up and it’s still with us here in much of the northeast where people like to listen to NPR. they think country music fans are dumb rednecks. NPR listeners are intelligent and sophisticated. There’s a definite red-state/blue-state correlation also. David J. Firestein, career State Department diplomat (working on his own), analyzed the distribution of country music radio stations in areas that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. He concluded: “[I]f you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region, probably right down to the county level.”

Would you want to bet that the NPR fan base would coincide pretty closely with the blue-state map? I would.

In his “Nashville Skyline” column, Chet Flippo describes country music fans thusly: “So Red pretty much means conservatives, upholders of traditional values, NRA members and beer drinkers. Blue is shorthand for liberals, tree-huggers, NPR listeners and wine sippers.” Flippo categorized James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen as country singers who appeal to blue state fans and Charlie Daniels and Toby Keith as country singers appealing to red state fans. Further distinctions between the two he describes this way: “It’s not geographic so much as it is mental. If it wears a cowboy hat, it’s Red. If it wears a beret, it’s Blue. Beer is Red. Merlot is so Blue. If your SUV is a Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover or Hummer, you’re Blue. If it’s a Jimmy or a Jeep, you’re Red. If your pickup truck is a Cadillac, you’re Blue. If it’s a Ford F-150, you’re Red. It’s snowmobiles vs. skis, power boats vs. sailboats; USA Today vs. the New York Times; Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Starbucks. Is your lawn mower a riding John Deere or a walking illegal alien? The first is obviously Red; the second, Blue.”

My pickup truck is a Toyota T-100 and I’m a wine sipper. The radio buttons in my car and my truck are set on talk radio stations, an oldies station, the local Conway, NH station which plays a nice mix of stuff, and NPR. One button in each vehicle is also set on a country music station. When NPR gets too smug, it’s a welcome antidote.

Distress Signals

We’re in trouble. As evidence, I saved four related articles with a common thread. Three are from lifesitenews.com - a Canadian Catholic newsletter, and one from the Boston Herald.

The first is about Spain. Last winter, the new Socialist government banned use of the terms “mother” and “father” on birth certificates. The father was to be listed as “Parent (progenitor) A” and mother as “Parent (progenitor) B.” Lesbian groups objected immediately, complaining that “progenitor” is a masculine term. They wanted “progenitora” which is feminine.

The second is from Ontario, Canada. The provincial government there is banning use of the terms “man,” “woman,” “wife,” “husband,” “widow” and “widower” from all Ontario law. The changes are an outgrowth of legalizing homosexual “marriage.”

The third is from Prince Edward Island, which is also banning traditional terms referring to members of families the way Ontario did. In PEI, there will be no more references to “bride” or “groom” on legal documents either, only the generic “spouse.”

The fourth is from The Boston Herald which reported last month that: “A Quincy [Massachusetts] mother says she was humiliated when an employee of the [Victoria’s Secret] lingerie franchise’s Faneuil Hall store flatly refused to allow her to breast-feed her daughter, directing her to a public restroom outside.”

All four articles represent disturbing, deconstructionist efforts to separate western perceptions of heterosexuality from reproduction, and from marriage and family. The story of a breast-feeding woman being shooed from Victoria’s Secret is telling, and not an isolated incident according to the Herald: “Last year, a woman was told she couldn’t breast-feed her baby in a Victoria’s Secret in South Carolina” and “[last month], sales associates at a Wisconsin Victoria’s Secret told a mother her exposed breast might offend some customers.” Can you believe this? Exposed breasts considered offensive by Victoria’s Secret?

Victoria’s Secret profits from the sensual display of women’s anatomy, especially breasts. While some may think such display immoral, I’m not necessarily one of them. As a lifelong heterosexual male, I’ve always appreciated women’s breasts. Even as an aging one whose other faculties are in decline, that appreciation doesn’t seem to diminish. Attracting male attention is one of the functions of the female breast and not an unhealthy one. Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie business is based on this fundamental human fact. However, to suggest that the other function of the breast - the nurturing function - could be offensive, is a dangerous bellwether for our time.

First Amendment cases adjudicated over several decades claim the display of women’s breasts can be protected speech, but according to the Herald article: “Massachusetts is one of the few states that doesn’t have laws to protect breast-feeding women. Women who breast-feed in public in Massachusetts can be charged with indecent exposure or lewd and lascivious conduct. A bill that would prevent people from booting breast-feeding mothers from public places and police from charging them has been stalled at the State House.” Yet, ultra-liberal Massachusetts is the only state to have legalized homosexual “marriage.” Maddening.

The US Supreme Court in “Lawrence vs Texas” somehow found a Constitutional right to sodomy. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court somehow found a state constitutional right for homosexuals to “marry.” The Socialist government of Spain and the Liberal Party government of Canada established similar rights. The reader has figured out by now that I consider these developments preposterous. They’re part of a concerted effort by the left to dissociate sexuality from reproduction, and to uncouple heterosexuality from its natural role in reproduction, marriage and family. Such intrinsic connections are “offensive,” they claim, and “heterosexist.” Homosexual activists lead the charge, relentlessly pressuring governments across the western world to cave in to their petulant demands.

What about the rest of us? What if we’re offended when we can’t be referred to as husbands and wives on marriage documents or as mothers and fathers on birth certificates? Why do we give in so timidly to bizarre demands from radical sexual minorities? What’s next? Abolishing Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day? Will we instead be forced to celebrate “Progenitors’ Day”?

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but listen up: Forget what they told you in college. Men and women are different and they’re supposed to be. Most men are aggressive. Most women are nurturing. Women attract men, get them to commit, and tame them. We call this marriage. Sex is a tool for this - heterosexual only. Homosexuality has no place here. When men see women use their breasts to nurse their children, it taps instincts in them to stick around, be fathers to their children - especially their sons - and to use their aggressiveness for the protection of their families and communities. This is an important part of our cultural glue. To the extent that we follow this plan, our culture is strengthened. To the extent we deviate from it, our culture is weakened. The last four decades are testament to this.

I’ve been watching with alarm as the left eats away at that glue and puts us all in trouble. I’ve had enough. Have you?

Angry Voters

Ordinary Americans are infuriated. Between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens live in the United States with more sneaking in every day. The federal government virtually ignores them. State governments ignore them. Local governments ignore them. No. It’s worse than that. All three levels of government don’t just look the other way; they implement policies to make the problem worse. They provide benefits to illegals like free schooling, free medical care, free food, subsidized housing, heating assistance, etc. When taxpaying citizens object through referendum votes to cut off funding, federal courts declare the cutoffs unconstitutional. Our federal government has sole authority to stop illegal immigration, but refuses to. Then it has the gall to use its courts to force states, cities and towns to pay for its malfeasance. Governors in states like Maine order welfare officials not to ask if an applicant is here illegally, and they face penalties if they do. Mainers already shoulder the highest tax burden in the whole country and our governor is telling freeloaders from around the world to come on over. Anybody from anywhere can force the rest of us Mainers to pay for them to live here free just by showing up. How long will this go on?

It used to be just a border state issue, but now the whole country is mad. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are dealing with it, but suddenly it’s a major issue for the November elections. It’s been big in border states for a while now, but as illegal aliens spread all over the country, so does the anger. Both parties avoid it but for different reasons. Democrats see illegals becoming citizens eventually and voting Democrat as so many ethnic-minority-victim-groups traditionally have. Republicans have two reasons: Businesses comprising a big part of the Republican base profit by hiring illegal low-wage workers and not paying benefits and passing those costs to taxpayers. Businesses also profit when wages for blue-collar Americans are kept low because millions of illegals work cheap nearly everywhere in the country. America’s working poor suffer the most.

Legitimate small businessmen suffer too when illegitimate competition with an illegal workforce is able to continually underbid them. Illegals cost about a third of what legitimate workers cost when you add in Workers’ Compensation, Social Security taxes, and all the rest. When illegals get sick or injured and are treated at emergency rooms without health insurance, those costs are passed on as higher taxes and higher health insurance premiums. Legitimate businesses pay for this along with the rest of us, but, with competition getting stiffer all the time, the temptation to go under the table increases.

Competition from illegal aliens is the worst problem, but legal aliens are displacing low-wage Americans as well. A woman from Sweden, Maine emailed me recently because her seventeen-year-old son lost his job to a foreign student. He worked at a local summer camp the past two summers and wanted to return this year. Though he worked at the camp, his employer was a large foodservice firm called Sodexho - a multibillion dollar, multinational food service company based in France. The boy had a good work record, but Sodexho informed him they were employing international students this year and he had to look elsewhere. This would seem to be in violation of Maine State Law, which states that employers may bring in foreigners only “. . . in cases where it can be demonstrated that there are insufficient qualified U.S. workers available and willing to perform the work . . .” Clearly that was not the case here. But, after September 11th, the new federal Department of Homeland Security assumed authority for granting and policing temporary work visas for international students and states don’t police it anymore. Nearby North Conway, New Hampshire brings in hundreds of foreign students to work in retail and tourist industries there during summer. The federal government can’t possibly assess the impact of legions of foreign workers on wages scales locally. Fighting terrorism is one thing, but feds should leave it to the states to regulate local economic impact of temporary foreign labor. Students working summer jobs to avoid huge student loan payments later must be able to negotiate a decent wage. The Maine woman who contacted me about her son is complaining to Senator Olympia Snowe even though she and Senator Susan Collins recently voted to grant amnesty to illegal aliens across the United States. Somehow, I don’t think she’ll be getting any satisfaction from our congressional delegation on immigrant labor issues.

Though President Bush - along with both Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate - want amnesty for illegal aliens, there is some hope from House Republicans. When they passed a strong bill calling for deportation of illegals and strong penalties for businesses who hire them, hundreds of thousands of illegals marched in the streets of Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities carrying Mexican flags and demanding “civil rights.” They thought they were flexing their muscles, but they only made it worse for themselves in the eyes of taxpaying citizens who will be going to the polls this fall.

Like I said, ordinary Americans are fed up. They’re infuriated and most of our representatives in Washington don’t even have a clue. It’s going to be an interesting election.

Hippie Pizza

After years of nagging from by wife about eating healthier, I’ve begun to tolerate hippie pizza - you know, the kind with little or no meat on top and no tomato sauce at all. Instead, there’s some goat cheese and vegetables of various types, some of which you’ve never heard of before. She promises they’re good for me, which usually means they won’t taste good. If you’re really, really hungry though and there’s nothing else to eat, they’re edible.

My first hippie pizza experience was at a restaurant with a lot of ferns in ceramic pots hanging from the ceiling on macramé straps and with fat candles around. I was very hungry and chowing down my little mini-pizza - an old-fashioned one with pepperoni, tomato sauce and lots of cheese. While I was eating it, my wife offered me a taste of hers several times, but I declined. “It’s very good,” she’d insist, “you should try it.” I’d say no and continue chewing my retro pizza. It wasn’t big enough though and I was still hungry when she stopped eating hers and there were a couple of pieces left. She saw me looking at them and asked, “Now do you want to try it?” I took a few bites and they weren’t bad if I sipped a little wine with them.

My wife and daughters love Flatbread Pizza, a chain of hippie pizza restaurants spreading around New England lately. So far, I’ve only been to North Conway and Portland but I notice patterns. Some customers have matted dreadlocks tucked up inside bulging Grateful-Dead-type knit hats. Others wear Phish-type bandanas tied in the back. Aging hippies prefer the old-style pony tails and few if any hats. They may be bald on top, but enough graying hair still grows on the sides to put an elastic on. Waitresses are skinny vegan women or smiling, Mama-Cass types. Dress is yard sale chick with nothing tucked in. One important difference between my generation of aging baby-boomers and the next group coming up: we tuck in our shirts and they don’t. Younger people want to project the image that they don’t care as much about appearances, taking great pains to select clothing which reflects that.

Most of the waitresses had little tattoos on them. I think there are more tattooed women in their twenties and thirties than men, a reversal from previous generations. I don’t know for sure what the tattoos portrayed because my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t want to put on my reading glasses and stare closely at their arms while they were writing down orders. They might consider that rude. One thing I didn’t see was facial jewelry - no lip studs or rings in nostrils, tongues or eyebrows and that was a blessing. Such ornamentation would be an appetite-suppressant for me and perhaps for some other patrons as well. Shaving legs or armpits is optional but that doesn’t bother me.

Around the Portland restaurant there are children’s drawings hanging on clotheslines resembling Tibetan prayer flags. Tibetans are hip because they’re more in tune with nature and the cosmos than heterosexual Republicans like me. The chairs and benches in Portland are yard-sale-chick too, painted over with different colors in their lifetime with newer layers worn away to reveal older, contrasting layers beneath. I think the message is that it’s better to use recycled wood than cut down trees to make new ones.

The menu proclaims organic vegetables, phosphate-free meats and free-range chicken toppings. The salads are organic, of course, and contain seaweed. It’s an old fisherman joke that when you reel in some seaweed instead of a fish for the dinner plate, someone will say you caught the salad. Well, there it was at Flatbread in Portland. The Pizza arrives on a typical round pizza pan, but the crust is oval-shaped and overlaps on each end. I think they could make it round if they want to but don’t in order to appear nonconformist. They don’t cut it up in the usual way either with the trusty roller blade making diametric cuts into wedges. No, they make one cut lengthwise through the oval and then perpendicular cuts across that, creating little rectangles instead. When the check arrives, it’s clipped on a cedar shingle with an old clothespin. Pretentiously unpretentious.

Flatbread’s website declares that it supports the community and the North Conway restaurant has a reputation for doing that. However, if it’s true that we are what we eat, I fear that if I continue eating there I may start wearing Birkenstocks and signing on with the Green Party. I going to have to load up on phosphates and nitrates when I eat at home just to preserve my way of life.

It's The Jihadists, Stupid

My fourteen-year-old students understand better who our enemies are than most elite journalists in our mainstream media. They know we’re not just fighting Osama Bin Laden and al Qaida, but a radical brand of Islam being spread around the world. It’s not a “War on Terror” as our president calls it; it’s a war on jihadists whose prime tactic is terror.

Televised reminiscences of September 11th proliferate as the school year begins so I go with the theme in class. Together, we watch planes hit the twin towers and Americans jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. We watch buildings collapse and panicked civilians running for their lives through the streets. I tell my students that others who sat at their desks a few years ago are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq now to defend America and western civilization itself and that they may choose to don a uniform themselves in a few years. Therefore, they should know why our enemies want to kill us. I can think of no greater responsibility as their US History teacher.

After the TV specials we do some background. We examine the 1979 US embassy takeover in Iran and the numerous attacks against Americans since - in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia. We study hijackings of ships and planes before 9-11. We study a map of the Middle East to locate relevant countries and cities. We study the Holocaust, the re-creation of Israel as a country, our alliance with Israel, and numerous Arab-Muslim attempts to destroy Israel. We compare and contrast Judaism, Christianity and Islam historically and in the present. We examine the economics and politics of oil in the region. We study the rise and fall of Islam over fourteen centuries and Muslim desire to reclaim past glories. Last fall, we examined Muslim immigration to Europe in light of French riots and the orchestrated Muslim riots protesting Danish publication of Mohammed cartoons.

On its web site, the National Association of School Psychologists warns teachers like me that: “watching replays of the [September 11th] attacks, predictions of future attacks, assessment of Homeland Security, or even stories about the history and whereabouts of the terrorists can raise anxiety levels.” Hmm. Radical Muslims are trying to kill us because we’re Americans. Relatives and friends of my students are fighting them in the Middle East. Former students are fighting over there too, and I should worry that teaching the causes of these things might raise students’ anxiety levels? Obviously, I don’t follow the advice of the NASP. What would they have me do in the face of all this? Teach complacency?

After Christmas break, a former student who had just finished a tour in Iraq as an Army intelligence officer visited and spoke to all five of my classes about what we’re fighting. When seventeen terrorist wannabes were arrested last week in Toronto, I used the occasion to review what we’d been learning all year. Three or four hundred miles away, students their age were learning jihad, purchasing tons of ammonium nitrate to blow up the Toronto stock exchange and Parliament, then cut off the prime minister’s head.

Nearly five years after September 11th, we should realize we’re fighting a radical offshoot of Islam - “holy” warriors who call themselves jihadists. Our enemies think their “purified” Islam will bring back the glory days of Islamic civilization in decline for centuries. We are their biggest obstacle. We didn’t declare this war on them; they declared it on us. In class, we watch a PBS Frontline video of Bin Laden declaring war in 1996. He instructs his jihadists to kill Americans wherever they can, whenever they can.

If all this should raise student anxiety levels as the National Association of School Psychologists warns, then I assure my students that our country has the finest military the world has ever seen or even imagined - as the Taliban discovered. The British empire, the most powerful on earth in the 19th century, tried twice to take over Afghanistan and couldn’t. The Russian Army tried for ten years and failed. It took the United States a few weeks and we did it from halfway around the world. Saddam twice discovered what the United States could do once we made up our minds. Zarqawi discovered it last week. But unlike the British or the Soviets, the United States goes in to take out the bad guys, rebuild the country, turn it back over to its citizens, and then encourage them to avoid dictators and run their government democratically. During World War II we did this in Germany, in Italy and in Japan and we’re doing it again today in the Middle East.

Though it’s out of fashion in academia these days, I teach my students that they live in the greatest country in history - one well worth fighting for. Elite, mainstream media journalists don’t seem to have learned this wherever they went to school, so they’re welcome to visit my class in September if they wish.

Animal Lover

I love animals, especially on the grill. Lately, I prefer domestic animals all cleaned, cut up and wrapped at the supermarket meat counter. Some guys like wild animals better, but for me they’re too much bother now that I’m an aging baby boomer. I’m a decent shot with a rifle or shotgun but it’s a lot of work to hunt them down, shoot them, disembowel them, drag them to the truck, butcher them, wrap them up and freeze them. I’m getting too old for all that.

There are other kinds of animal lovers who consider them equal to humans, but I’m not in that category. Growing up, I did get friendly with some dogs though. We had a German shepherd named Trixie which, if an older boy tried to push me around, would show her teeth and growl menacingly. I had to like that dog. She got old and died and my parents got a mongrel named Tootsie. He had a brave heart too, but lacked the strength to back it up. Consequently, he got thrashed in clashes with other dogs. Still, he never backed off and I had to admire that. As they say, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

Two years ago we buried a wonderful mongrel named Molly after seventeen years. She was gentle and smart and knew her place. She got expensive near the end of her life, but she was worth it. Her replacement is a large, unintelligent Yellow Lab/Irish Setter cross. Neither breed is known for smarts and Hannah is no exception. She’s huge and high-maintenance - a black hole of need, constantly seeking to be patted and stroked. And, she eats a lot. I may get a hernia carrying in huge bags of dogfood from the car. It doesn’t take long for Hannah to gobble it all down and what comes out the other end is of commensurate size. When she drinks water from her bowl in the kitchen, she slobbers about a quart all over the floor. You know how it feels to step in water right after putting on fresh pair of socks? Not a pleasant sensation. In winter, her hairs are all over the fleeces I wear and the back of my wife’s car is covered with them. When I ride in the passenger seat, Hannah is right by my left ear breathing and drooling. She’s not allowed in my car or in the cab of my truck either. She barks whenever a stranger approaches so she does serve as a kind of organic security system, but if I had my ’druthers I’d replace her with an electronic one. I tolerate Hannah only because my wife likes her.

Other kinds of animal lovers consider them superior to humans and I’m certainly not in that category. These are your rabid animal lovers. They would rather humans were extinct so we could turn the planet over completely to animals. When alligators ate three women in Florida last month, rabid animal lovers blamed humans for encroaching on the alligators’ habitat. It was the women’s own fault the alligators ate them.

Speaking of predators, a big black bear has been hanging around my neighborhood lately. I went out my door at 6:45 one morning and he was sniffing around my grandson’s swing set. He looked at me and sauntered down the hill into the woods like he owned the place. My wife has a counseling practice here and she told me some clients noticed the bear again outside her office. One said the bear was “brazen,” not afraid of people at all. Then I read about a black bear attacking a young family after climbing over a fence in Tennessee. The bear killed a six-year-old girl, mauled her mother and critically wounded her two-year-old brother after picking him up by the head and holding him aloft. Rabid animal lovers claim such attacks result from increased human encroaching on bear habitat, but Forest Service biologist Laura Lewis said in USA Today: “People don't want to think it is a natural behavior on the part of the bear [to eat people], but I really think it is.” I’m with you Laura. It’s natural for alligators to eat people too.

Why is this so hard for animal lovers to accept? Do they think all animals are vegetarians like they are? It should be obvious that bears love humans too - as tasty morsels. My six-year-old grandson plays on that swing set and the next time the bear comes around may be his last. He’s encroaching on my habitat now. Rock musician and hunter Ted Nugent wrote a book recently called “Kill It And Grill It,” with a recipe for “Bar-B-Que Black Bear.” I’m going to Amazon now and order it. Maybe I could learn to love bears. I’ve never tasted one on the grill before.

Missing Stub

Lovell’s Board of Selectmen didn’t need to meet twice a week but Stub insisted, so we did. His real name was Gordon Eastman, but nobody called him that. “Stub,” I learned later, was short for stubborn, and he was that. Mostly, the attribute worked in his favor but not always. People knew Stub as a kind and generous man, but you didn’t want to get him riled. Stub died last week at 89 and I’m feeling the loss.

I was the first “flatlander” selectman and I thought I’d have an impact on the way things were done. Looking back on it now though, I’d have to say that with Stub on the board and others like Dave Fox, the way things were done had much more influence on me than I ever had on it. I’d recently moved from Massachusetts and was still a liberal Democrat in the Boston-Irish-Catholic tradition. Stub was a Yankee Republican. We disagreed on much but he was patient with me. When people ask what caused me to become so conservative, I say there were many factors, but one of them was Stub Eastman.

Tuesday nights from 7:00 to 9:00 and Saturday mornings from 9:00 to noon, the selectmen had open-door meetings. Anyone might walk in and many did, usually Stub’s friends. In early spring, it was often Nucky Wilson, the public works commissioner, carrying a bowl of fresh smelts - fried in corn meal and still warm. When I asked where he got them, he’d wink and say, “Just enjoy ’em.” Some of Lovell’s best brooks were officially closed to smelting by the game warden and he was always on the lookout for violators. Nucky’s smelts were delicious. Later, longtime summer people like George Olive or George Stone (also conservative Republicans) would drop by and chew the fat. At selectmen’s meetings, we spent a lot of time just talking while Stub and his friends were having more of an influence on me than I realized at the time.

For centuries, small towns in Maine and Massachusetts have been governed by “Selectmen, Assessors, and Overseers of the Poor.” They comprise the executive body of a town with voters at town meeting serving as the legislature. Stub was chairman, or what some towns call “First Selectman.” Though paid a meager salary, he was in the town office every morning and kept things running well enough that Lovell didn’t need a town manager. When I was first elected back in the early 1980s sometime, Stub wanted me to be General Assistance administrator because I was the new guy.

The experience significantly modified my liberal view of the poor as hapless victims. Of the many applicants for general assistance during my tenure, two out of three had dubious claims. In a small town of 800-1000 people, we got to know each other. If people moved in and lied on their applications, we usually found out about it before long. In my first year, most of the chronic transients knew more about Maine’s General Assistance law than I did. I had to learn fast or be taken advantage of. The really needy often got more help from us than they requested, but deadbeats were so closely scrutinized that they either got a job or left town.

Stub was a selectman in the 1940s and took a long view on poverty: “We have the poor and the poor have us,” he’d say. Having pondered that often over the years, I take it two ways. First, the poor will always be among us no matter how much society tries to eliminate poverty, and we will always be obligated to them. They have us by the short hairs, so to speak. If they have no heat or food because they’ve squandered their resources on alcohol or other frivolous things, and they’ve faked disabilities, we have to help them whether we want to or not. In another sense, we’ll always have the poor to challenge us in our very humanity -and we’ll have to answer to God someday about how we deal with them.

Stub grew up on a farm with no electricity until he was an adult. That meant his lifestyle had been little different from someone growing up in the 19th century. As a young man, he logged with hand tools and horses. By the time I knew him, he’d seen more change in his lifetime than most, and he’d accumulated wisdom that few others have the opportunity to gather. We were from very different backgrounds. I’d lost my father shortly before moving to Lovell and Stub had lost his only son at nineteen back in 1959. I won’t get all mushy here, but we each had a hole and there was a kind of symbiosis. We met twice a week for eight years and got to know each other well. I can say without reservation that Stub was a man I admired and thoroughly respected. I shall miss him. Lovell is diminished by his passing.

Generation Fallow

On Mothers’ Day, three generations of mothers gathered at my house and I noticed something: my extended family is shrinking. My mother gave birth to eight children. My wife bore half that many - four. My oldest daughter has one child and my second-oldest is pregnant. Neither is talking about having any more. Birth rates are declining in my family and we’re not unique. Our children’s generation isn’t generating much. Many have only one or two or none at all. For a society just to maintain itself, each woman must bear 2.1 children. For it to expand, the birth rate must exceed that. American society as we’ve known it is static or declining.

When I ask today’s young people why they want so few children I hear a lot of different answers, but the two most common responses go something like: “I can’t afford them; children are too expensive these days,” or “I don’t want to bring them into this crazy world; it’s too scary.”

I’m not sure what to make of answers like that when I think about the so-called “Greatest Generation.” Commenting on his lifetime, my 84-year-old father-in-law said, “The happiest times in my life were when we were eating onion sandwiches.” Asked what he meant by that, he explained that his family was very poor while he was growing up and all they could afford to eat sometimes were onions and bread, but those times were his best, he claims. He and his wife raised seven children after living through the Depression and World War II. Compared to all that, what has today’s generation faced? Nothing nearly so daunting, yet they fear the future. Their standard of living is much higher, but they can’t afford children? Are they in despair? Are they selfish?

My wife claims she was happiest when the kids were little and we ate soup. We struggled every month to pay the bills then and she stretched the food budget by making a lot of soup. We had four kids and, on my teacher salary, we were officially below the federal poverty line. We’re not poor anymore but I can’t say we’re necessarily happier.

Why did hard times and war make people optimistic enough to usher in the baby boom, but relative peace and prosperity have made young people today fearful and fallow? Have they had it too easy? Some blame the decline of traditional family and marriage, or single parents, birth control, abortion or homosexuality for declining birth rates.

Some of this came into focus recently when bronze statues depicting a traditional family of four at a baseball game were offered to the city of Portland, Maine as a gift from the AA baseball team’s owner. The city council referred the matter to their Public Art Committee which voted 6-1 to reject them. The committee, according to the “Portland Press Herald,” felt that: “...the statues fail to reflect Portland's growing diversity, both in its people and its artwork. Portland has significant minority, single-parent and gay-parent households, and committee members have said they want fewer statues of white people.”

White people? The statues were bronze. However, nonwhite immigrant populations, both legal and illegal, have much higher birthrates here and elsewhere in the country even though they tend to be much poorer than the native-born who claim they can’t afford children. If poorer immigrants are confident enough to bear children, perhaps their progeny are more deserving of America’s future more than the more sparse descendants of the native-born.

The same thing is happening in Europe, but even more so. To quote from a recent article in “USA Today”: “Not a single Western European country has a fertility rate sufficient to replace the current population, which demographers say requires 2.1 children per family. Germany, Russia, Spain, Poland and Italy all have rates of about 1.3 children, according to the U.N. The Czech Republic's is less than 1.2, and even Roman Catholic Ireland is at 1.9 children. (The U.S. rate, which has remained stable, is slightly more than 2 children per woman.)”

Concurrent with this is the abandonment of Christianity on that continent. Are the two trends related? Perhaps. The great European cathedrals, built with the labor and sacrifice or much poorer people are almost empty on Sundays as prosperous Europeans of today have abandoned them.

Here in the U.S. assaults on religion in the public square and on the traditional family continue. Both, however, are holding out, and many are pushing back. A lot of Americans still attend church on Sundays. They still have enough hope to bring children into this world. In spite of 45 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade, America’s birth rate hovers at replacement level.

Where do we go from here? It’s either grow in hope or shrink in despair.

Stranger Than Fiction

If students lose interest in my lessons, I’ll catch the brightest ones surreptitiously reading fantasy novels about good and evil and wizards under their desks. Last week they learned that what’s happening in Iran is fully as fantastic as anything in their novels. On the blackboard, I wrote “Twelfth Imam”; “Ahmadinejad” and “well.” Then I told them to take out their laptops (which are equipped with wireless internet), google those terms, and find connections.

In prior weeks we discussed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s statements claiming “Israel should be wiped off the map,” that the “Holocaust never happened,” and that Israel could be relocated to Alaska or eastern Europe somewhere. They were amazed that a leader of a country could possibly deny the Holocaust. “Hasn’t he seen the pictures?” they asked. I responded by shrugging my shoulders and sticking out my lower lip. “That’s ridiculous. Is he crazy?” they asked. Again, I shrugged. I knew what they would find in their search and it only took a few minutes before one raised his hand and said, “Ahmadinejad believes the Twelfth Imam will come out of a well at the end of the world.”

“The Twelfth Imam is also called the Mahdi,” said another, after struggling with the pronunciation a bit. “His name is Mohammed Ibn Hassad, and he’s a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“He went into occlusion in the 9th century” said still another student, after struggling to pronounce occlusion. “He went into a cave. Allah kept him alive and now he’s down in the well, waiting to come out.”

“He’s been waiting for over a thousand years?” I asked.

“That’s what it says.”

“It says here that Jesus will be with him when he comes out,” said another. “The Twelfth Imam will come out of the well when there’s chaos on earth. The ‘Twelvers,’ are people who believe the Twelfth Imam is coming. Twelvers think they can bring him out by making the chaos. Ahmadinejad is a ‘Twelver’ and so are some others in his government.”

“The Madhi will calm everything down after the chaos,” said a girl. “He’ll bring a thousand years of justice and peace.”

“Okay,” I said. “Supposing Ahmadinejad wanted to create enough chaos to bring the Mahdi out of the well, what might he do?”

“He could shoot a nuclear missile at Israel,” said the student.

“Israel has nuclear missiles too,” I said. “Several of them. If Iran and Israel exchanged missiles, would that bring chaos?”

“Gosh, I think so,” he said. Others nodded solemnly. Some bit their lips as they considered the implications.

One girl was waving her hand enthusiastically and looking at her screen. I called her name and she said, “Ahmadinejad talked about the 12th imam in a speech to the UN last November. I have some of it right here. Should I read it?”

“How long is it?”

“Two paragraphs.” I nodded and she started reading:

“ ‘Dear Friends and Colleagues,
‘From the beginning of time, humanity has longed for the day when justice, peace, equality and compassion envelop the world. All of us can contribute to the establishment of such a world. When that day comes, the ultimate promise of all Divine religions will be fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being who is heir to all prophets and pious men. He will lead the world to justice and absolute peace.

‘O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.’ ”

“Thank you,” I said. “Ahmadinejad didn’t mention the Twelfth Imam by name though. You think that’s who he was referring to?”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” said the girl.

“Assuming you’re right,” I said, “Can the United States reason with someone who thinks the way Ahmadinejad does?”

She shook her head. “No way. He’s crazy.”

“What if the United Nations started a trade embargo?” I suggested. “Might that prevent him from building a nuclear weapon and shooting it at Israel?”

“I doubt it,” said a boy. Others shook their heads.

“What should we do then?”

“Nothing,” said the boy. “Let Iran and Israel wipe each other out.”

I pulled down a wall map of Asia, took my pointer and said, “Iran is here. Right next to it is Afghanistan, here, where we have troops. On the other side of Iran is Iraq, here, where we also have troops, and Iraq is right between Israel and Iran. A lot of the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz, right here next to Iran. If nuclear missiles start hitting, it will be difficult for all that oil to get through. There would be severe shortages all around the world.”

“Maybe we should send someone in there and shoot him,” said a boy.

“Maybe the Mahdi will come out of the well and fill the world with justice and peace,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

Consequences

Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, my father liked sitting in his chair watching episodes of “World At War” and “Victory At Sea.” I’d sit with him through the black-and-white, 30-minute programs and occasionally, he’d point at the TV and say, “I was there,” or “That’s the kind of ship I served on.” I’d see a gray warship with its bow plowing through large waves. Sometimes he’d point and say, “Your Uncle Bobby was there with General Patton,” or “Your Uncle Joe flew on a plane like that.” He didn’t display much affect as we watched and we sat through a lot of those programs. I was proud that my father had been involved in dramatic battles like D-Day, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa but I couldn’t brag about it to my friends because all their fathers were in the big war too.

Author Studs Terkel called it “The Good War,” and wrote a book by that title. No war can really be good. Terkel called it that because everybody was behind it, soldiers and civilians alike. If there was dissent, it was silent. America had been attacked and the country was united. Everyone realized that we could lose if we were not. We were fighting against Germany, Japan and Italy. There was no doubt that those countries, very different from one another, would nonetheless cooperate in the effort to defeat us. We were their biggest obstacle to world domination.

“The Good War” came out in 1984 and the contrast with Vietnam was obvious. At first, America was united against communist North Vietnam, but we all know how that changed. Comments from North Vietnamese leaders afterward acknowledge how much opposition to the war in the United States helped their effort and contributed to our ultimate defeat. Over 58,000 Americans died and over a million Vietnamese. Another million Vietnamese boat people fled the country after our defeat. Cambodian communists, called the Khmer Rouge, killed another two million people after taking over that unfortunate country. North and South Vietnam were reunified under communism, but now they’re realizing it doesn’t work. That’s difficult to admit now though, after all the misery they went through to get it.

Americans who opposed the Vietnam War wear their opposition as a badge of honor and they’re correct when they brag about how they forced the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. They don’t like to acknowledge however, that their efforts also led to the misery of the Cambodian Killing Fields and the Vietnamese Boat People but they own part of all that too. They don’t like to hear Vietnam Vets talk about how they felt when they heard about people back home pulling the rug out from under them while they were fighting and dying in the jungles. Americans have freedom of speech and the press and we exercise them often, but we must take responsibility for what we say, what we write, and what we broadcast. All that dissent affected our effort in Vietnam and it affects today’s war against radical Islam.

Today’s activists try to deflect that, claiming they oppose the war but support our troops. Come again? How is that possible? When senators, congressmen, and journalists claim the American war in Iraq is based on lies, they’re also saying our soldiers are dying over there for nothing. Empty statements like, “but we support the troops” only add insult to injury. They may salve the consciences of the dissenters, but our soldiers are not comforted. Ask them. They’ll tell you. Several of my former students who served there have told me they wish reporters and broadcasters wouldn’t focus constantly on the negatives, that we’re doing great things over there but all that’s being reported is gloom and doom and quagmire.

It sounds just like Vietnam after 1968. American soldiers were disheartened then, and they’re disheartened now. Likewise, our enemies were encouraged then and they’re encouraged now. Television networks choose not to show footage of Americans jumping from the World Trade Center, of Zarqawi cutting off the heads of American hostages, of terrorists dragging the bodies of American soldiers through the streets, or of Palestinians cheering the September 11th attacks. No. Footage like would remind the American public of what we’re fighting against so let’s keep that film in the can. Instead, we’ll show footage of endless car bombs and pools of blood in the streets. We’ll call terrorists “insurgents” and claim that, even though Saddam Hussein used nerve gas against the Kurds and the Iranians, he had no weapons of mass destruction. Even though he harbored terrorists like Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Al Qaida training camps, he had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden.

Yes, there are consequences for the drumbeat of negativism about our efforts in the Middle East. If we lose in Iraq, and the wacko Iranian President Ahmadinejad gets a nuke and makes good on his threats to “wipe Israel off the map,” will antiwar activists continue to claim there’s no connection between any of these Islamic terrorists?

Get this: They all hate Israel; they all hate the United States; they all hate Europe, and they have special contempt for western liberals. They want to make the world Muslim. If they win, there will be no women’s rights or gay rights or anything resembling civil rights at all. Those will be the consequences for your smug anti-war activism, and you better realize it before it’s too late for all of us.