Dean's World

We had the time of our lives last night. We were all part of a wave that picked up in the late afternoon and put us down around 1 am. My father, me, and my son--3 generations--had money on the Giants. My father is recovering from a very serious surgery at a hospital a few blocks away--I dropped my son off in his recovery room with 3 oranges, a bottle of water, a bagel, and a pack of depraved cupcakes from a bodega. I stayed through kickoff, then went my own way. My father said that the way they prolonged kickoff to accomodate commercials made him "ashamed to be an American."

I told V. I wanted to be at a very packed bar, any bar, and we found one within half a block. I enjoy the Superbowl the way a rat might enjoy the melted butter spraying over his head near the traveling amusement park's concession stand. I don't understand the game in the slightest but I take any opportunity to be around men acting like men without feminine interference: The way they all become a single vast organism, reacting in the same instant, the same way, leaping from their barstools and hollering and pumping their arms into the air, and high fiving. I hollered right along with them, in ignorance, and felt happy.

Everything about it kills me: The way they know what they're doing every second, they way they play so utterly together and the way they weave and spin this fantastic drama in front of our eyes--the unquestioned drama of the ball which may be the last American story. To my eye, it all looks like a crazy pile of men in helmets never really getting anywhere, but I follow the roars and when they catch the ball or drop it or run with it, I feel the thrill and I begin to grasp, little by little.

It's a story, football, told in a few hours, that picks you up, tosses you around, suspends you, slams you down, and finally gives you true catharsis.

We walked up Broadway and people were just screaming straight out. Leaning out of windows screaming and running up and down the street screaming. I screamed too. I didn't stop smiling all night. For once in my life I was "on" the winning team.

Vincent almost knocked my tooth out from flailing in laughter over the Doritos mouse commercial.

The Victoria's Secret commercial struck me as a bummer; It insinuated an end to the world of all men acting like men, and that was the very thing that I was having such a good time with. I have become convinced that women should have their worlds and men should have theirs. It all gets boring when it mixes too much. I was once at a neo-Orthodox Jewish wedding and they separated the men and women for dancing and I was in heaven. A few women complained and I told them they were crazy wrong. I pulled up a chair and watched as the charismatic young Rabbi started dancing right in front of me, for the men, not for me.

The world of men is a place of great beauty, clarity, conviction.

I am well aware that I can't touch it, can't join it, can't understand its laws or partake in them.

But I can watch, under cover of caring about the Superbowl, per se. I can love the sight and sound of all those thundering hooves across the plains, the dust, the hunt, the importance of the kill. I can know, once in a while, that I am utterly insignificant, that it is time to stand back and just watch a group of creatures acting natural. There will always be beauty in that, as there was last night.

Tomorrow I am actually getting on the 1 train and going all the way downtown to join the Victory parade--pretending to be a very advanced Giants fan.

So my graphic novel CAIRO came out this week. The day it was released, artist MK Perker and I spent an hour on the phone, alternately basking in our glory and worrying about how the book would be received. There have been some good reviews and some postmodern ones, but overall the response has been positive. Bill Willingham, creator of the hit comics series FABLES and the only Neocon at my chest-heavingly leftie publisher, actually gave the thing a glowing cover-quote. In other words, it's been a good week, and I should be pleased. And I am, but it's a pleasure complicated by politics.

On the afternoon of the day the book came out, I did a signing at Zanadu Comics. One of the guys who stopped by--trench coat, glasses, archetypal--picked up the book and flipped through it, then looked up at me with the air of a connoisseur of useless miscellany.

"Clearly she hasn't learned that a ninja never hands over her weapon," he said, pointing to a character swathed in a black face-veil and robe, who was giving her gun to a skeptical-looking man in a burnoose. The character's name was Tova. She was an Israeli soldier, not a ninja. I held my peace. The guy went on to tell me he hoped I was ready for the big-leagues of fiction after something so trivial as journalism. (Journalism is like falling out of bed, he drawled, It's like, woah, did I just write something? Fiction takes actual work.) Guys like this are an occupational hazard of comic-writing, and if they're buying what I write, far be it for me to mock. I let him talk, nodding at appropriate intervals. But I had been thinking about Tova too, and about the other people who would look at her and see something she is not.

It’s a common thread in the comments section of many a political and cultural-issues website: blogging is useless. It affects nothing, changes nothing, has no impact on the greater issues of our time. When anonymous cyber-commentators fail to appreciate the fact that if blogging is useless, commenting on blogs is less than useless, irony is certainly dead—however, that’s not my point. I want to talk about what I call ‘the Conversation’.

The term first occurred to me when we started getting television out of Iraq again. Most if not all of the Iraqi satellite channels went offline during the first year of the war. Then, in the autumn of 2004, we started getting a signal: a simple computerized list of displaced Iraqis seeking their relatives that would scroll down the screen as Iraqi folk-songs played in the background. Though we didn’t know who these people were, though a highly censored episode of Friends was playing on one of the culturally schizophrenic channels out of the Gulf, it seemed all of Cairo was glued to this timid little channel beamed from Baghdad. It was a sign; the olive branch retrieved from a flooded world, the simple message that the entire Arab world had been waiting for: ‘We’re still here’. People watched that scrolling list of names and wept.

And then, there were pixels: Deus ex machina, God from the machine. One little signal out of Baghdad had done more to reassure people that normalcy might again be possible than a year of press releases. I realized that what was truly crucial to the digital age was not information but conversation: a vast, real-time, evolving dinner table discussion about the state of the world. It was made up, by and large, of the voices of ordinary people with ordinary concerns, not grand theories. Bloggers, though often crude, formed an essential part of that conversation. Sure, blogging probably doesn’t change very many minds about very much. It probably hasn’t swung very many votes. But what it has done and continues to do is erode individual prejudices. The blogger effect is the butterfly effect: on the information superhighway, one person encounters another person of wildly different politics and disposition, and because the anonymity of the internet provokes a candor you don’t get anywhere else, comes to respect him. They don’t agree. They’ll never agree. But what they will do is make an effort to understand each other.

Those who run down the blogging phenomenon and new media in general misunderstand the nature of change: they expect it to come all at once, in a wave, as a sudden overturning. But more often than not, sustainable change happens one person at a time. There will be no revolution that reconciles East and West, no great détente that resolves Left and Right. Differences will never be eliminated, but they can be understood. In this capacity, the Conversation is not only far from useless, it is essential.

Rick Moran has become pessimistic on the war, and says time is now our biggest enemy in Iraq. Ah, time.

I remember being told in 2004 Iraqis wouldn’t vote or wanted a theocracy. In 2005 we were informed by experts that the effort to liberalize Iraq was doomed because they couldn’t agree on a constitution, and in 2006 they couldn’t form a government. This year, most were confident the Anbari tribes were never going to join the police. There’s always something for defeatists to point to. Just pick up your morning paper and the MSM will be trumpeting the insoluble problem du jour.

Rick says he has reached his new opinon based on the many mistakes made in Iraq. Ah, mistakes.

Why was the fleet at Pearl Harbor caught unawares and defenseless? How did hundreds of slow-moving, obsolete torpedo bombers end up being sent into utterly hopeless and futile attacks on the Japanese fleet, attacks from which almost none returned alive? Who decided to send U.S. forces into battle with the underarmed and underarmored Sherman tank? Why did we continue to waste the lives of thousands of Marines in suicidal frontal assaults against fortified Japanese positions long after it was clear the tactic was ineffective? How the hell did military planners not anticipate Europe would have hedgerows? Surely such incompetence should have doomed our efforts — but of course it did not. Much of the prowess of the Western military tradition is the result of its ability to self-criticize and adapt, as is happening now in Iraq.

Also, apparently long-forgotten are the brilliant triumphs of 2003, the lightning three-week advance to Baghdad (itself described more than once as “bogged down,” and with at least one prominent retired general predicting disaster, saying “we didn’t bring enough armor to this fight”), the single glorious “thunder run” through Baghdad which was sufficient to cause the regime’s forces to collapse. One must weigh not only failures, but also successes, including the rise of democracy and basic freedoms.

I agree with Rick that Bush has not been a great communicator on the war, which is probably one reason why there is so much excitement about Giuliani in the GOP despite his social liberalism. With virtually the entire MSM arrayed against the effort, it takes a master orator to put things in their proper context and drive perceptions. But absent such inspired leadership, rational men and women must distill the truth from the morass of agenda-driven journalism themselves, and employ empiricism to draw conclusions. This is where I think those forecasting defeat fail.

In Iraq, if not in America, time appears to be on our side, not against us: in addition to the progress noted above, every day the ISF get a little stronger while the insurgents' relative position gets a little weaker. The tide has turned in Anbar. Petraeus is deFOBbing our troops into small, local garrisons that create security for Iraqis rather than security from Iraqis. Al-Sadr has fled the field and many Shia militias are apparently standing down.

Here’s a simple point that very few Americans understand: Aside from Sunni Arabs, most Iraqis don’t think the current situation in Iraq is that bad right now. Polling shows this over and over again, with a majority saying life is going fairly well. How is that possible, with the car bombs going off all over? Well, Iraq isn’t the U.S. or Europe: if you’re Kurdish or Shia, there’s a good chance you’re digging your relatives out of mass graves put there by the last regime, and you’ve certainly spent the last few decades without basic freedoms like assembly, speech, and press—or being allowed unrestricted access to things like cars, satellite dishes, computers, and cell phones.

Liberalizing Iraq was never going to be easy, that insufficiently foreseen reality the legacy of a brutal kleptocratic police state dotted with rape rooms and mass graves, where Sunni Arabs terrorized Shia and Kurd with arms bought by oil money stolen out from under those it oppressed. We should just be thankful the price of freedom for Iraq isn’t nearly as bloody as in South Korea, Japan, or Germany — or, as a commenter noted, the American South.

Back in the 1950s William F. Buckley Jr. conducted a purge in the ranks of his young publication, The National Review. He was running a conservative publication at a time when conservative publications were not respected and were thus by nature low-circulation. In those circumstances it would be hard to stand on principal and refuse to associate with certain parties who might provide short-term gain.

Buckley refused to align his publication with elements on the right that were excessively hateful, rabidly racist, or just plain nuts. The whole thing came to a head when Buckley one day drew a line in the sand:

You could either be a John Birch Society supporter, or you could write for the National Review.

One or the other. "Both" was not an option.

This is a minor correction to my friend Ron Coleman's earlier article by the way. It was not anti-semites he threw off his publication, although he was no anti-semite and hired many Jews. No, it was radical frothing nutjobs who saw Communist conspiracies everywhere. Buckley was staunchly anti-Communist, but would not align himself with people who saw everything as a Communist plot.

Today National Review is still one of the most respected conservative intellectual journals. The John Birch Society is rightly remembered as a bunch of right-wing nutjob conspiracy theorists.

Not that the National Review is the greatest publication in the history of the universe, but it's a venerable and respectable institution that's made a difference in the world. I find the example inspiring.

And, having wearied of fighting constantly against Islamophobic fools on Dean's World and other places, only to have people ridiculously deny the very possibility that there could be any such thing as Islamophobia even when the evidence is presented them full in the face, I've decided to draw a similar line in the sand:

You can be an Islamophobe, or you can contribute to Dean's World. You cannot do both.

This is meant for front-page contributors, submitters, or even commenters. It is time for you to make a choice, and to live by that choice. Because I certainly intend to.

Simply put, you must agree withto all of the following assertionsassumptions:

1) Islam does not represent the forces of Satan or the Anti-Christ bent on destruction of the Christian world.

2) There is no 1,400 year old "war with the West/Christianity" being waged by Muslims or anyone else.

3) Islam as a religion is no more inherently incompatible with modernity, minority rights, women's rights, or democratic pluralism than most religions.

4) Medieval, anachronistic, obscure terms like "dhimmitude" or "taqiyya" are suitable for polite intellectual discussion. They are not and never will be appropriate to slap in the face of everyday Muslims or their friends.

5) Muslims have no more need to prove that they can be good Americans, loyal citizens, decent people, or enemies of terrorism than anyone else does.

Is this a test of "ideological purity?"

Why yes. Yes it is.

If you cannot accept, wholeheartedly, all of the above 5 assertions--without exception or weasel-wording--then if you are a front page Dean's World contributor you should turn in your keys and say goodbye. You can do it gracefully or ingracefully. You can do it by email or by posting whatever you want on the front page before you go. Your choice. But you need to do it: you need to leave.

Furthermore, I will accept no more debate upon this matter by commenters bent upon snarky, snotty, Islamophobic irrationality. You should either stop using your comment account, or you should be prepared to simply be thrown out without further ado.

I'm done with this.

By the way, feel free to take us off your blogroll if you can't handle this. Or to ask me to take you off of ours.

We can still be friends if you want. I have relatives and even friends who are racists, sexists, homophobes, even anti-semites. But I won't provide them with a forum either.

Criticism is fine. Intellectual argument is fine. Traditionalist moral arguments are fine. But I will not provide a forum for haters or paranoids.

I'm done. Islamophobia has no more place in polite society than any other form of irrational hatred, and I will no longer be any part of hosting discussions or "debates" with Islamophobes.

*Update*: Made a slight modification above. Sorry about that. Nothing really major though.

Greetings all; Nice to be back. The censor monkeys that patrol my mind have kept me from saying what I think I am thinking on certain subjects that Others seem to Know All About, such as the post 9/11 shockathon now perhaps rightly being called the Brink of WW3.

This self-censorship despite the fact that I researched and ghost co-wrote a book on the subject in 2001/2002. During this research, I read, for instance, the fantastically frightening text called the Jihad Manual. This is a document said to be a blueprint for the final destruction of Western Civilization, down to the last ash of the last page of Plato's Reblublic, and said to be from Moussaui's laptop.

Somehow, I lost all nerve. I learned to just shut up, and kept saying I didn't know what to think or say. I even started saying that maybe women don't know how to think or write about War. (I should have said I don't know how to.)

But today I broke my internalized silence, and wrote the following email to a few friends and colleagues, upon reading Sam Harris' piece on Head In The Sand Liberals:

I am not yet certain where this piece was published but I was struck by the clarity and proportionality of it. Perfection. I can't see any earthly way for this not to be correct. In other words it is correct. Unfortunately. As many of us classicists have been arguing ad nauseam, it is very dangerous to depart from evidence based science, and now the craze against reality/evidence has come full circle. We are into the age of post-cognition, where on the one hand that which is NOT THERE is feverishly conjured, (the sex/death retro viral epidemic for example) (Kierk-gd's 'monstrous nothing') whereas what IS there (planes exploding into towers, mass death, be-headings, clearly signaled grand finale Jihad against West Civ) is spectacularly denied. There are days when I wonder whether it might work to just read things upside down, turn the computers, newspapers and TV sets upside down. Everything is inverted. All responses reduced to the psychosis of the Bad Daddy, as this piece illuminates.

History has shown that there is no way to pry people from their convictions with facts, even when said facts occur in real time, and are documented through the best technologies of the Information Age, the paradox of which seems to be that we don't eat information.

I suppose the only thing left is to be kind to one another.

With vertigo and trembling,

Celia

Z's dead, baby. But Osama bin Laden (OBL) remains alive.

Nowadays, we don't hear from OBL much - but evidence overwhelmingly suggests he is still alive. Alive, OBL still poses an immense threat to the security of the United States. The threat is not necessarily from another personally-orchestrated massive attack upon US soil, but rather the rallying effect that OBL has upon rank and file jihadis worldwide. It is unlikely in fact that OBL has any direct operational control over Al Qaeda - the latter organization now more of a "version 3.0" distributed entity rather than a coherent hierarchical chain of command.

OBL's primary influence comes from his fatwa (pronouncements). Traditionally, a fatwa has simply been a ruling on a religious matter - an interpretation of fiqh. A believer who has a question on religious interpretation or action would go to the ulema (learned scholars or local religious authorities) and present their case; the ulema would render an opinion after consultation with the Qur'an and those hadith which their School considered valid.

In the time of the Prophet SAW of course there were no schools of thought, only Islam - hence any pronouncement by the Prophet was a fatwa by definition. Likewise, the various Caliphs and Sultans and Mughals and whatnot also issued fatwa that applied to their subjects, because their authority was religious as well as political. In modern times, with the exception of Iran, no Islamic government claims religious authority and hence they do not issue fatwas (though certainly they compel their citizens through other means).

So how then can OBL claim such authority? Into the vacuum left by secular (tyrannical, to be sure) governments, stepped any charlatan with the desire to reshape Islam. Syed Qutb was that charlatan, and Bill Allison of now-defunct Ideofact blog did truly yeoman's work in deconstructing Qutb's writings. OBL simply took Qutb's ideas further, and has adopted a kind of "caliph in exile" mantle. Dan Darling has termed this dynamic "Magneto appeal".

The bottom line is that OBL has no authority to issue fatwa other than that granted to him by muslims themselves. To combat him, therefore, requires a systematic delegitimization of OBL as an authority. I undertook one such delegitimization a few years ago and am re-posting it here.

The primary text of OBL's fatwa in 2002 was as follows:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God." . . .

We — with God's help — call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.

The very first statement asserts that "killing Americans and their allies" is an "individual duty". The Qur'an does in fact support violence if in defense against attack, but here OBL explicitly describes the targets as "civilians and military." Note that if you make the argument that there is no such thing as a civilian, then that qualification is unnecessary. Presumably then OBL does make such a distinction, and thus he is knowingly calling for the murder of innocents.

What does the Qur'an have to say on the matter of killing innocents?

We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our messengers with clear signs, yet, even after that, many of them continued to commit excesses in the land. Those who wage war against Allah and His prophet, kill the believers and plunder their property shall be disgraced in this world, and for them is a dreadful doom in the hereafter. (5:32-33)

The contrast is crystal clear. What OBL is calling for violates Qur'anic precepts. His assertion that this is the "duty" of all Muslims is thus ignorant and self-refuting. His gross ignorance of the Qur'an demonstrates that he is an impostor of religious authority.

(With irony, note that the very same ayats are interpreted by jihadis and Islamophobes alike to mean the opposite. Then again, translations of the Qur'an are inherently flawed...)

Also consider the following ayat, invoked by OBL, and a perennial favorite of Islam "debunkers" as well:

Surely the number of months with Allah is twelve months in Allah's ordinance since the day when He created the heavens and the earth, of these four being sacred; that is the right reckoning; therefore be not unjust to yourselves regarding them, and fight the polytheists all together as they fight you all together; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil). (9:36)

This is directed at two targets. First, the polytheists (or more accurately, pagans or idolaters) here are specifically the tribes of Saudi Arabia before Islam, who used to observe a year of 13 months after two years to combine the solar and lunar years, due to which they had to transfer the observance of Muharram to the succeeding month, Safar. This verse condemns their interference with the lunar calendar. Note that wrongful interpretations of the ayat usually hinge on mis-translating "polytheists".

Second, taken in a broader context, it says to fight them together as they fight you all together. Since Islam is not under attack by America or her allies (in fact, Muslims reside there as well, and none of the established schools of jurisprudence consider American muslims to be inferior or non-muslim), this ayat simply does not apply. One might argue as OBL does that America has attacked Islam, via proxy targets in Iraq, etc. but the very presence of muslims in the West essentially renders it moot. I can't speak to whether those who denounce Islam as inherently violent consider America to be at war with Islam or not; however it's probably accurate to say that if they don't, it's for lack of sufficient effort.

Finally, we come to the following ayats:

Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers. But if they desist, then surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. And fight them on until there is no more Tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression. (2:190-193)

These ayats are often used by fanatics in a manner precisely opposite to their intent. The main points here are that fighting is only permitted in self-defense. If fighting starts, then kill them wherever they are found, unless they ask for mercy (an inherently Jacksonian model). Most importantly, show mercy when one has the upper hand.

Given that OBL calls for a campaign of violence against individual innocents, and relies on tortured readings (which could be lifted straight off JihadWatch) to buttress the claim, he is in fact calling not for jihad (which I have discussed in detail) but rather hirabah, or war of intimidation.

Hirabah is strongly condemned in the Qur'an, for example the explicit reference in 5:33 to those whose intent is "mischief through the land". AltMuslim.com wrote an excellent piece on hirabah earlier, which observed:

Because the word jihad roughly means "religious effort," the West can come off as attacking the daily life of ordinary Muslims, while terrorists get away with wrapping their crimes in religious phraseology. Muslim scholars are meeting in Washington with US officials to change this. "When people carelessly dump on jihad, it has an immediate polarizing effect," said Khaled Abou el Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA who will attend the meeting. "It may not change much, but it allows Muslims and non-Muslims to say something about terrorists without appearing to malign Islamic theology.

Khaled Abou el Fadl, referred to above, is an accomplished writer on Islamic law. His book, Speaking in God's Name, is a very thorough look at how religious terminology is abused by the extremists. It is vitally important that these differences in terminology are understood - more than merely semantics, it is the framework for understanding the problem of radical fascist Islam and the underlying problem of tribalism. I urge other bloggers to make a point of calling terrorism harabah and not jihad, and to avoid labeling every frothing opinion of extremists as a fatwa.

Islam is actually the solution to the problem. It is in our collective best interest to understand the classical interpretations of Islam, because that understanding can shape policy. Consider post-war Iraq. If we simply set up a barbie dolls and rock and roll culture, then there will be a fundamentalist backlash. And as we saw with Afghanistan, should the fanatics gain power, they become incubators for terror groups like Al-Qaeda.

This is the propaganda war we must fight against OBL. We can buy into his framing, and let him continue to hijack the faith (and even lend him aid and comfort as he does so by accepting his interpretations). Or, we can delegitimize his authority - and it starts by using a simple word in place of another.

On Sunday, Judith, Jeff and I went to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak at PEN's 'World Voices' tour.

The basic points of the talk: Ayaan Hirsi Ali told New York Liberals to respect their enlightenment values. Interviewer Gourevitch wondered what was to be done with this difficult woman. The audience responded by giving her a five minute ovation. I'm surprised we didn't light candles and do the wave.

Speaking for myself, we weren't just clapping because we agreed with her or because we admired her bravery. We were clapping because she could express feelings that we no longer can. Like Wafa Sultan and many pro-democracy activists in the Middle East, Hirsi Ali understands and loves liberal and enlightenment values. Ms. Ali tried to communicate that love and passion to us, but even the basically sympathetic audience didn't really get it. Some people giggled uncomfortably when she mentioned freedom and the joys of owning property; they were like a bunch of junior high-schoolers listening to passionate love song - they wanted to hear more, but the subject was so embarrassing.

The best surprise: Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses, sat near the stage. Early on, the soft-voiced Ali confessed that as a young Muslim, she protested in favor of his death. Later she admitted that she had wanted to burn his book. "Not just the book" he quipped.

Ali describes herself as a Muslim atheist. She speaks out in favor of bringing the enlightenment to the Muslim world. Like Irshad Manji, her message is that Muslims need to question the authority of their Imams and of Mohammed. Muslims need to think for themselves.

She said that there are many Muslims and former Muslims out there who believe the same thing - but they're not willing to say so out loud, because they fear the wrath that the Islamists will stir up. She hopes that the West would defend their own values and the lives of the whistle-blowers of the Muslim world.

That is basically the message that has prompted death threats, accusations of Islamaphobia and extremism against this soft-voiced, elegant and reasonable woman.

Unfortunately, we've gotten so used to living with the kill-all-apostates brigade - their message often raises fewer eyebrows than Ali's.

Honestly - does Hirsi Ali's message sound extreme to you?

[More details from the New York Sun, linked to by Atlas ]

UPDATE: I should also mention that while Hirsi Ali was on tour, her neighbors successfully evicted her from her home. Of that, Callimachus writes

Of course, for her bravery, Hirsi Ali has been rewarded by the Eurocrats by being evicted from her home because the neighbors are afraid to live next to someone who makes waves.

I remember the aftershock week that followed Sept. 11. The attacks cracked through America's shell and some of what oozed out was darkly ugly. My girlfriend at the time lived in Birmingham, and one of her best friends was a pretty Persian girl, identifiably Middle Eastern on sight. Nobody knew what was happening, or what was going to happen next. There were stories of physical attacks on anyone who looked vaguely Islamic; there were fears of how law enforcement would react.

But her neighbors rallied to her, and every time that girl left the house, for an errand, for her job, for anything, someone went with her. Just in case. There were stories like that everywhere. People who had never been inside a mosque turned out to stand guard over one, just in case. Those of us with Middle Eastern neighbors kept an eye on the, always asked how they were doing, if they needed anything. Just in case.

I don't think we're better than the average European. But I do think we're different. How could we not be? We're the same people, 300 years back, who segregated themselves voluntarily. Those who took religion seriously, those who were greedy and ambitious, those who felt the stirring of individual spirit stronger than the urge to stay safe in the herd — they came here. At tremendous risk, they crossed half a world. They survived here, in part, by keeping an eye on each other. They're our grandfathers and grandmothers.

Those who were content, or unwilling to take risks, stayed. Modern European history has many heroes, brave men and women. But they are, on the whole, exceptions. The mass of Europeans kept their heads down and hoed their own rows. When the knock on the door came in the middle of the night at their neighbors' houses in 1942, they closed their eyes tighter and pulled the covers around them tighter and pretended to sleep.

I just returned home from spending several days in a very rural part of the country - upstate Pennsylvania, Wellsboro to be precise. I haven't written much about my experiences there, mainly due to the fact that I'm still mulling them over to see what they mean to me. Being a suburbanite who has spent a lot of time in big cities and abroad, I've never really thought much about rural America. However the older I become, the more likely I imagine myself living there. There's a lot to be said for clean air, rolling hills without McMansions covering them, and people who work hard without complaint. I feel like I experienced something deep and wonderful that is currently not ready to be formed into words and coralled by grammar and syntax. But here is a try.

Last Friday the Family visited Draper's Super Bee Apiary. Since we came late in the day, we were given a personal tour of the apiary by Bill Draper, the founder's son and current head of the operation. In a small warehouse we saw boxes of beeswax, gallon jugs and 50 gallon drums of honey. On shelves were observation hives - safety glass mounted in frames of oak, maple and cherry. By connecting a wooden tunnel between the outside and the hive, you can watch bee activity from the safety and comfort of the indoors. Bill had two of these set up, one with a bee cam where people from all over the world can see what Bill's bees are up to.

Bill showed us around the operation, and took time answering all of our questions. He explained the workings of the hives, and spoke lovingly about the bees. He also mentioned how his business had boomed from the Internet, how his small company in upstate PA fills orders from Korea, China and Japan for honey, beeswax and propolis - a resin that the bees excrete which some believe has medicinal properties. His son, Royal, setup and maintains the website. When we met him he had just finished edging around some of the hundreds of outside hives the family owns. He was attended to by his dog, a beagle that he had nursed back to health after it had been hit by a car. As the dog bounced around excited at his master's presence, Bill talked about bees while using his bare hands to protect the Kid's ears and eyes from a few annoyed and inquisitive bees.

On a door in the warehouse hung several photographs and letters from the White House and George W. Bush. Surrounding these, and tacked on walls all around the operation were thank you cards from children and adults that had visited or purchased products from the Draper's from around the world. It was clear to the Wife and me that this was a family-run operation that was growing thanks to a combination of factors: the ubiquity of the Internet, fast and inexpensive shipping, and the traditional values of family, patriotism and solid, no-nonsense customer service. While we were there the phone didn't stop ringing for more than a minute or two. Bill Draper apologized for each interruption, but we were happy to see him busy as he took orders from Texas and California.

Driving by the outfit one would think that the Draper's Super Bee Apiary was a thing of the past. However, stop by and you will see the a truly innovative and high-technology operation. The Drapers produce and distribute high quality products. They provide the kind of customer service that makes one feel good about giving them business, and they do so from an area of the country people may not know much about (at least, I didn't).

I plan to keep bees someday soon, and you can bet that Draper's Super Bee Apiary will be my first stop when I set up my hives. In the meantime I am happy knowing that in upstate PA there is a bright spark of innovation.

Well, there are several sparks - a growing firestorm actually. In fact that's the big issue I'm struggling to write about. What I saw was a part of the country was not what I was expecting. I didn't see an area mired in the poverty of its past, but one that was coming alive after the boom and bust of heavy industry, mining and logging. I felt that the region was undergoing a new revival, getting a second chance at success and prosperity.

I'm a big believer in second chances, or what the Kid calls "do-overs". Northern PA/Southern New York is at the beginning of a massive do-over, and the Draper Family is leading the way. I'll probably join them eventually in Rural America someday, but until then all I can do is tell you that something is happening out there in Rural America - and it's something worth writing about.

I'm not much into lifestyles anymore. As I've gotten older I've become more family-focused, and group-identity is down there with "paint the basement walls" in terms of priorities. But one group that I've always liked were the Beatniks of the 40s and 50s.

I still have the copy of "On the Road" that I read in high school, took to college, then to Japan, Africa and finally to middle age in Suburbia. Opening the book today it is hard not to feel the rush, the flight into the unknown, the celebration of living and breathing and "being" that Kerouac captured in that work. "On the Road" is a long trip across America and through the human spirit, and even as I live in the same house I've lived in for years, the book still tempts me to grab the Wife, the Kid and the Pets and just start driving West - job, mortgage and credit card debt be damned.

I got to thinking about the Beats at a parish carnival the Family visited Saturday night. The parish was in a working class part of town where liquor stores and gas stations compete with one another for prime space along the main boulevard before it ends at the Interstate. The Wife noticed that the people in the crowd seemed to wear their tax brackets on their faces, prematurely aged from a life of hard work, hard living, and hard playing. Cigarettes were ubiquitous, and it was impossible to get away from the smoke. Hip-Hop culture dominated the predominantly white crowd, but there were a large number of mixed-race families and a few Latinos, one wearing a silk-screen of the black Virgin Mary with the words "La Raza Unida" printed underneath. Was the shirt racist? I asked to the Wife. "Don't be so sensitive," she wisely replied.

I felt like an outsider, but I usually do in large crowds which is why I do my best to avoid them. But the Kid loves carnivals and being a Parent trumps personal likes or dislikes, so we had gone together. As I stood in line, watching the Ferris Wheel "Carny" work the ride, I noticed that unlike the board expressions shown by the other Carnies, the man seemed to enjoy his job. He was polite to the riders and even joked with them as he manned the throttle, locked the pipe railing, and warned each rider to mind the latch.

The Beatniks came from working-class backgrounds for the most part, but they were intellectuals too. Some of them had served in World War 2 - Kerouac in the Merchant Marine which during the War wasn't exactly the safest job - and others, like Allen Ginsberg, came from academia. Neal Cassady, Kerouac's and Ginsberg's muse for their early works, even came from a hard-scrabble background of a drunk and abusive father.

They were not elitist - or at least they didn't start out to be. The Beats celebrated the Working Man. They appreciated the artistry and skill shown by workers doing their jobs, a concept which connected them spiritually to Zen Buddhism as exemplified by the poetry of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photographer Robert Frank's landmark work, The Americans, shows slices of everyday American life and manages to convey the beauty and perpetual motion of its land and people in a way missed by the Look and Life photographers of the era.

I'm speaking in generalizations somewhat here, which happens whenever you talk about groups of people - especially those counting "loners" like Kerouac and "socialites" like Ginsberg as members. But it struck me as I walked through the crowd that the Beats were the last counter-culture group that weren't elitist. Ever since the Beats evolved into the Hippies of the '60s and the Hippies found themselves at odds with the "common people", the counter-culture has been elitist and when that counterculture became "pop" culture, that elitism came too.

Today's pop culture sneers at what it calls "Red States" or the "Nascar Crowd" - yet the Red States continue to swell with immigrants from other states and NASCAR remains the fastest growing sport in America. Green Day may make a killing on calling them "American Idiots" yet the same people that buy their records continue to enlist in the military. I wandered through the crowd and realized that this was the America that remains undefeatable. It was a crowd that wouldn't be losing any sleep over the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo and probably cared as much about America's image abroad as they did about Michael Moore's grooming habits or lack thereof.

And I realized that the elites come and go, but these people will always be here. They might have a few more piercings and tattoos than their predecessors, but they will remain solid and steadfast, constituting - dare I say? - the bedrock of American society.