Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Friday, October 18, 2002
21:56 - The man can preach	(top)
Did anybody happen to catch Tom Friedman's Commonwealth Club speech from September 25, rebroadcast on PBS radio (and presumably elsewhere) tonight? It was interesting-- he seems to have been able to steer a narrow course that ties together the Left and Right sides of the post-9/11 political landscape in a way that I haven't seen a single person do before. He drove right to the point-- "Islam sees itself as God 3.0, Christianity as God 2.0, and Judaism as God 1.0-- and yet for some reason (must be because America and Islam, the proponents of the older versions, sabotaged God 3.0), Islam has failed where the older versions have succeeded wildly. This they see as wrong and in need of swift rectification. Therefore, because there's been both a 1.0.1 and 2.0.1 reformation, bringing those two religions into the modern world, we need a 3.0.1 reformation in Islam as well." Effective metaphor, and he didn't breathe a word about 9/11 being caused by American imperialistic arrogance or support for Israel. In fact, he said quite the contrary-- al Qaeda is driven by cognitive dissonance arising from a "deficit of dignity", and as Friedman noted, dignity is at the heart of most of what really makes people mad. (Later, he pointed to India as the perfect example of a modernized Islamic nation: a country in which the President is Muslim, the Muslim women demand (and receive) equal rights at mosques in Hyderabad, and the richest man in the nation is a Muslim software engineer. Interesting point.) But then he turned around and laid out some milestones for us to follow, which included "being a good global citizen"-- working to curb our SUV culture and global warming and so on. Okay, fine-- he almost lost me there. But his motive was about making sure we're living up to the standards we demand of our enemies in a modern world, and making sure we don't come across as contemptuous in our attack on Arab Nationalism (or whatever the term of the week is)-- because the beneficiaries "can smell contempt at a hundred paces". Better to make absolutely clear that we want them to change in order to succeed, not because we want them to fail. He said invading Iraq was not an imperative-- and here he went off course for a bit. He said he wasn't at all afraid of Saddam's WMDs, because Saddam's not suicidal; if he uses a nuke, Baghdad gets flattened. Well, okay, fine, but what if he gives nukes to terrorists? I'm not worried about a nuke or smallpox in a SCUD. I'm worried about it in a Cessna. He mentioned that his travels have indicated that the "70% in favor of war" poll numbers don't appear to have any basis in reality-- but neither would the opposite be true; instead, most Americans are ambivalent and nervous about this war, because right or wrong, imperative or long overdue, this war is seen as one of choice, whereas Afghanistan was a clear-and-present-danger kind of thing. I think that's probably true, but I do feel we have more to lose from wrongly guessing that Saddam isn't readying WMDs than from wrongly guessing that he is. He ended on a point about the globalization of communication and technology, sternly noting that the Internet has as much power to make people stupid as to make people smart. After all, the chief reason 90% of the Arab world believes the "4,000 Jews were warned to stay home from the WTC that day" thing was that "they read it on the Internet"-- which, to a great deal of the world, is a more legitimizing honorarium than having seen it annotated in a scientific journal. I didn't agree with all of it, but I did sit in the driveway with my radio on and my lights off for half an hour so I wouldn't miss any of it. The man's no apologist, but he's no dupe either. I hope there are highly-placed ears in his audience.