Best dedication ever?

To the Beatles,

     to the Airplane and the Spoonful and the Dead,

     to Simon and Garfunkel, Joplin and Hendrix,   

     to Buffalo Springfield and the Rolling Stones,

     to the Doors and the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas,

     to Melanie, to Donovan, to Peter, Paul, and Mary,

     to the Who, and the Moody Blues, and Moby Grape,

     to Country Joe and the Fish, Paul Revere and the Raiders,

     to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell

     to the Mothers of Invention and the Smothers Brothers,

     to the Hollies and the Association and the Beach Boys

         and even Herman and the Hermits,

     to Creedence Clearwater Revival,

     to lost innocence and bright, shining dreams,

and, especially, to Paris:

     looking at you, I hear the music.

The Armageddon Rag

George R. R. Martin

Past the Tipping Point

…when you're under murderous assault is precisely not the time to turn your entire political culture inside out. That's what the terrorists want you to do, that's what they are dying for you to do. But you're supposed to resist that temptation.

Instead, in thrall to the serpentine blandishments of fear, we spooked ourselves (or at any rate allowed our political class to spook us) into the grotesque disfigurations of the Patriot Act; the witch hunts aimed at Arabs and South Asian immigrants (many of them second- and third-generation American citizens); the botched invasion of Afghanistan; the calamitous Iraq fiasco; the preposterous fetishizations of Hallowed Ground and the Families and the Heroes; in sum, the hysterical deformation of virtually all of American politics, which in turn allowed the egregiously incompetent President George W. Bush that second term with its Katrina debacle, burgeoning deficits, and the whole clueless build-up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

...

The 10 years just passing, as we all must realize if we are being honest with ourselves, constituted the hinge decade, the decade when something substantial had to be done if the world were going to avoid the exponential catastrophe into which we have now embarked. (You can't go on sagely noting, year after year, that we have only 10 years left within which to confront the crisis, without at some point those 10 years having run out.) Perhaps we could have done both: honored the victims of 9/11 while at the same time tending to the far greater devastation bearing down on us. The point is that, obviously, we weren't able to, and in almost every conceivable way, the result has been an utterly squandered decade.

Shame. Shame on us.

Lawrence Weschler, New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University

The Chronicle Review, August 11, 2011

Be Afraid! Be Very Afr... I'm sorry, what?

…Islamic terrorism has not posed as large a threat as reporters and the public think – certainly not as large a threat as Al Qaeda and its affiliates intended. They routinely complain about the failure of Muslims to join their movement.

Of the 56 million people who die each year around the world, around two million die from HIV/AIDS.  Nearly one million die from malaria.  Almost three quarters of a million die from violence.  According to the National Counterterrorism Center, terrorism peaked in 2007, with 23,000 fatalities, half of them in Iraq – a terrible toll, but not a leading cause of death.

In the United States, 15,000 people are murdered each year.  Islamic terrorism, including the Beltway sniper attacks, has accounted for almost three dozen deaths in American since 9/11 – a small fraction of the violence that the country experiences every year.  The toll would have been higher if the perpetrators has been more competent…Even so, the number of perpetrators has been relatively low.  Fewer than 200 Muslim Americans have engaged in terrorist plots over the past decade – that’s out of a population of approximately two million.  This constitutes a serious problem, but not nearly as great as public concern would suggest. 

Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina

The Chronicle Review, August 12, 2011