In end-of-the-year phone calls from friends near and far, many express despair at the state of the world. I fully understand why, but I don’t accept their despair. In fact I can make a strong argument against it. Because what has changed is not so much the world itself, but our awareness of it.

A single click on the screen you’re looking at right now will bring you to visceral images from thousands of miles away. A Syrian boy’s body washed up on the shore of a Greek island. A young woman beaten to death and set on fire in Afghanistan after a malicious rumor that she had burned a Quran (which leads me to ask “and even if she had…?”). Crazed Israeli settlers celebrating a wedding by cheering the arson murder of a Palestinian baby. A white cop shooting a fleeing black man in the back. We focus on such images, and ask what the world has come to.

We forget where it has come from.

When Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature came out a few years ago, I bristled at the pseudo-religious sentimentality of the title. (Okay, I still do.) But the book has stayed with me, along with its subtitle: “why violence has declined.” Yes, you read that right.

Pinker is no cock-eyed optimist: he’s an empiricist, and he spends close to 700 pages proving his point with data . “We can see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and war,” he writes, “or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence.”

Now, it’s true “the standards of history” are pretty low, and that as Pinker himself notes, to make such a case in a century that began with 9/11, Darfur, and Iraq could well be seen as hallucinatory, even obscene. But it’s also true that despite what we see on the news, more people live more safely than ever before.

The difference is that now we know about violence. News spreads almost instantaneously. Cellphones are everywhere. Images are captured in real time, and seen in real time. And it’s only human to focus on these images.

So how do we deal with so much knowledge? How do we go about our lives with this awareness?

Outrage, shock, and even despair all seem to me healthy reactions. Because they are reactions, and not so long ago, there were none.  White cops once shot unarmed black men as a matter of routine. Refugees have drowned and starved in far greater numbers in the past. Women were once set on fire in Massachusetts as well as in Afghanistan. And massacres were by the thousands, even without the aid of guns. But all of this was hidden from immediate consciousness. Such events once passed for the most part unnoticed, unreported, unremarked upon until far later.

And more important, we didn’t see the violence. We didn’t have the evidence of our eyes. Now we do, and it encourages me that we are shocked. That we are outraged. That we do condemn. That we do care.

Evil can no longer take place under the cloak of silence.  We hear it, and we see it. And we speak up against it. We are all witnesses now. And as witnesses, we will step forward.

And yes, despite the evidence of our eyes, this is progress.

The right-wing is trying like hell to do a number on the minds of American women. You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.

In fact 90% of all American women who’ve had an abortion are either glad or simply relieved they did (click here for the research.)  And for every woman I know who’s had an abortion (that’s half the women I know, and quite possibly half the women you know too), a safe, routine, minimally invasive procedure was far from the hardest decision of their lives. For many, like me, it was the simple, sane choice. The only hard part was finding the money to pay for it.

You want a hard decision? What about marriage? Or divorce? Taking on a mortgage? Choosing a cancer treatment? Allowing a terminally ill spouse to die with dignity? What about the multitude of hard decisions we all have to make in the course of our lives, men and women?

But right-wingers don’t think women capable of rational decision-making at all.  It’s apparently especially hard for us delicate souls, which is presumably why they think we agonize over it and decide wrong.  How very Victorian of them. They’re apparently white knights in shining armor, out to save every woman from her own distressingly poor judgment.  In their ideal world, no woman would be “allowed” to make a decision without prior permission from the Republican caucus.  Certainly not any woman with an income under a million a year.

But it’s not our decision-making that stinks, it’s theirs.  Because not only is it morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s full of lies — deliberate lies.

— Like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pretending to be near tears as she talked about watching a video that didn’t exist and never had.

— Or the head of the House Oversight Committee trying to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by using a bogus chart created by an anti-abortion group.

— Or abortion opponents pretending there’s no such thing as an embryo.  They’d have us think that every abortion is that of a full-term viable fetus, when none are.  The vast majority of abortions are embryonic, medically defined as up to eight weeks from conception.  But hey, you can’t see an embryo on a sonogram, let alone wave photographs of it in an attempt to guilt-trip women.  So lie, baby, lie — and screw the lives you mess up in the process.

It’s clear by now that nobody cares about facts in the fantasy world of today’s Republicans.  Real facts, that is, as opposed to imaginary ones.

Those of us who live in the real world know for a fact that imaginary facts are dangerous.  Remember those non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as the reason to invade Iraq?  Or those non-existent scientists asserting with great authority that there was no such thing as climate change?

Forget hard decisions for the moment.  Here’s an easy one:  A year from now, do all you can to make sure we send this gang of women-hating, war-mongering, planet-polluting liars back to whatever slime pit they crawled out of.

If you happen to live in Gaza, the one problem with accepting the ice-bucket challenge is that it requires a plentiful supply of ice. After seven weeks of bombardment, water is in short supply in Gaza, and electricity is scarce, so there’s no way to make ice. As journalist Ayman al-Aloul noted, however, what Gaza has in abundance is rubble. In fact thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, it has whole neighborhoods of it. Thus: the rubble-bucket challenge, which I accepted this afternoon halfway round the world in Seattle.  Please consider this an open invitation to take the challenge too:

(The rubble I used came, either ironically or appropriately, from a building site.)

I am going to wage peace upon everyone who disagrees with me. It will be an aggressive, offensive and hostile strike that will continue until I inflict the final death blow to misunderstandings and conflict. I will gather all my available resources & weapons for this assault. I will never surrender until the foes of harmony surrender. I declare war on war. I will inflict peace on everyone and occupy your fear with understanding. You will suffer under my brutal campaign of tranquility. The enemy will endure the horrors of justice, tolerance, compassion and freedom. I will indoctrinate the aggressors with acceptance until the resistance is futile. I will show no mercy for hate. If you are not with me you are against warmth, love and little furry baby animals.

This brief manifesto was posted on Facebook earlier today by Palestinian-American stand-up comedian Aron Kader, followed by this update:

My war against war begins tomorrow. I will be on CNN tomorrow on the Brooke Baldwin program to talk about the murder of my cousin Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the police beating of Tariq Abu Khdeir. Also my plea for ceasefire in Gaza and how you will never convince me we cannot have peace.

To say I’m an instant fan doesn’t begin to cover it.  Finally, a war I can support!

And now…?

Photo:  Wissam Nasser for the New York Times

I still have no words that I trust.  Only this photo of a doctor weeping in the overflowing morgue of Shifa hospital in Gaza:

(photographer: Oliver Weiken, for the New York Times).

My disgust with the Israeli government is so deep that I don’t trust myself with words.

But really, two articles in today’s New York Times say it all.

In the first, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is quoted advocating the Israeli invasion of Gaza in order to ensure “a normal summer vacation for our kids”  (the quote is way down in the 14th paragraph of the story).

In the second, we see what appears to be Lieberman’s idea of a kids’ summer vacation in Gaza:  four boys, ages 9, 10, and 11, killed by Israeli bombs while playing soccer on the beach.  It’s accompanied by this photo by the award-winning Tyler Hicks:

Reports from eyewitness foreign journalists here.

In Flanders Field the poppies grow

Between the crosses, row on row.

World War I began a hundred years ago today.  In the next four and a half years, seven million civilians and eight and a half million soldiers were killed, and twenty million were severely wounded.  And 25 years later, World War II began.

Here’s one of the northern France killing fields today:

And here’s one of the cemeteries.  Most of the headstones are inscribed “A Soldier of the Great War, Known Only Unto God.”  There are not enough red poppies in the world for this:

(Photos are from “A Conflict That Shaped the World” in today’s NYT.)

The video is chaotic.  It shows a woman being stripped, tossed around, hit, kicked, held down, penetrated, beaten into unconsciousness by a mob in Cairo.  It’s described in this New York Times report, which avoids any link to the video itself.  In fact the original YouTube upload has been deleted.  Deleting it, however, is just another way of trying to cover it up.  As I write, this one is still active.  And yes, you are warned, it’s brutal.  As all rape is.

I know that those who read this blog, men and women alike, will be incapable of watching these couple of minutes with anything but horror.  But I also know that part of the reason it went viral when first posted is that there are men out there who are turned on by it.

Just the thought of that makes me want to gag.  As does the boys-will-be-boys response to it from an Egyptian TV host, who said, with a stupid giggle:  “They are happy.  The people are having fun.”

This isn’t “just” an Egyptian problem.  Or a Nigerian or Somali or Brazilian or Turkish or Italian or Swedish or Indian or Pakistani one.  My first association was with last year’s photo of an unconscious near-naked girl being lugged around by wrists and ankles, like a carcass, by high-school rapists in apple-pie Steubenville, Ohio.

This sickness infects some men, but affects every woman.  Yes, all women.  The Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen took off in response to the misogynistic shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, California two weeks ago, and here’s the formidably intelligent Rebecca Solnit on what it means.

Solnit was in Seattle last week talking about her new book, Men Explain Things To Me, and when she mentioned her unease at finding herself alone on an elevator at night with a strange man, there was a lone weird laugh from a man behind me in the audience.  It wasn’t clear what he found so funny.  Perhaps he simply couldn’t understand this kind of unease.  But every woman can.  It’s the year 2014, and yet it’s still not “wise” for a woman to go down a dark street at night, or ride in an empty subway car, or walk in the woods.  What was most remarkable about Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, was not the length or the difficulty of the hike, but the fact that she was a woman walking alone.  If she had been male, there would have been no book to be written.

It’s absurd that the onus is still on women to avoid being subjected to violence.  One way and another, we are told to avoid this, avoid that, take care, take karate classes, be on the alert, be afraid.  Don’t go out at night, say some.  Stay home, lock yourselves in, adopt the behavioral equivalent of a chador.  (Don’t go out at night?  An equally rational ‘solution’ would instead be to tell men not to go out at night.)

But there’s an antidote.  And it comes from men — men who really do respect women, and who know that to remain silent in the face of woman-hatred is only to give it free rein.  As former president Jimmy Carter put it in A Call to Action, violence against women is not only a woman’s issue;  it affects us all, and the only way to win this battle is to work together.  I take heart from this photo that artist D.K.Pan posted on his Facebook page after the Santa Barbara massacre.  Women are finally speaking out;  we need more men like Jimmy Carter and D.K.Pan to speak out with us.

I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

The come-on, in a brief item in the New York Times arts section:  “A Picasso for $135?  There’s a Chance.”

Yeah, sure.  I would have ignored the headline except that it ran under a photo of a run-down street somewhere in the Middle East.  Tyre, as it turns out.

The $135 is for a raffle ticket, and the raffle is a fund-raising project run by the International Association to Save Tyre.  How exactly the intended arts center and research institute could save this war-battered town on the coast of south Lebanon is not at all clear, but the organizers sure know how to get attention.  Apparently reckoning that international big spenders wouldn’t know Tyre from Timbuktu, they came up with a splashy prize:  a gouache said to be worth a million dollars.

The most I’ve ever spent on a lottery ticket before is $2.  Yet it wasn’t Picasso that made me go here and drop 67.5 times as much.  Nor the absurd idea of a million dollars hanging on the wall of my houseboat.  In fact much as I admire Picasso (there’s a bronze head of his in the Tate Modern right now that I could stroke all day if they wouldn’t throw me out at first touch), this piece, Man With Opera Hat, doesn’t really do much for me.  Perhaps because I’m just not that into men in opera hats (men in fedoras would be something else…).

No, what inspired my extravagance was Tyre itself.  Or rather, Tyre’s most infamous princess, Jezebel, who was born when it was at its most splendid, three thousand years ago.  The same magnificent Phoenician princess who married the king of a small mountain kingdom called Israel, challenged the fierce prophet Elijah and sent him packing, died one of the most gruesome deaths in a book not known for eschewing grue, and and was branded a harlot for her trouble by the men who wrote the two biblical books of Kings.  I wrote a biography of her some years back, and I’m still half in love with her.

Even her sworn enemies, the Hebrew prophets, were half in love with her.  Maybe more than half.  Here’s Ezekiel delighting in the splendor of her home city even as he savored its eventual fall:

You were an exemplar of perfection.  Full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.  You were in Eden, in the garden of God, and a thousand gems formed your mantle.  Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald, the gold of your flutes and tambourines – all were prepared on the day of your creation.

So you might think the New York Times would ask the organizers what happened to Tyre, and how come the most sophisticated civilization of its time was reduced to battle-scarred poverty, its run-down buildings overlooking the archeological remains of what once was.  Instead, they asked this:  “What would Picasso have made of the raffle?”

Pfah!  They could at least have asked what Jezebel would have made of it.

“A tiny little gouache?” I can hear her saying.  “That’s it?  With all the wars fought and blood shed since I was alive here, wouldn’t Guernica have been more fitting?”

In the whole debate on whether to deploy a missile strike against Syria for the use of sarin gas, my mind has been (appropriately?) like the many-handed Hindu goddess of darkness and death, Kali.

— On the one hand, what exactly would a US missile strike achieve, especially since President Obama has so carefully described it as limited in scope and intent?

— But then am I really so callous as to say we should not move when chemical weapons are deployed, especially against sleeping civilians?

— Then again, the level of the debate has sickened me (all the talk about maintaining America’s credibility, for example, as though that were more important that what’s actually happening in Syria — or the talk about how we can’t let Assad “get away with it,” as though he were merely a schoolboy who’d broken the rules).

— But does that really mean we just sit back and do nothing?

— Though that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as an average of 5,000 Syrians have been killed each month.

— But is military action really the only option?

—  And isn’t the idea of a surgical strike another of those military oxymorons created for armchair warriors thrilling to missile-mounted cameras as though war were a video game?

—  And shouldn’t the US have intervened to prevent chemical weapons being used, instead of as a gesture of disapproval after their use?

All this, and I haven’t even gotten to the question of who would actually gain from such a strike.  And without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and…

Kali needs more than eight hands.

But today’s diplomatic developments seem to me immensely hopeful.

All I know at this moment is what you do:  Russia has publicly proposed that Syria give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons.  And since Russia has so openly supported the Assad regime (and been a major supplier of the ingredients for those weapons), and since Assad has so publicly claimed his regime did not use chemical weapons (all evidence to the contrary), the demand that he give them up to avoid a US-led missile strike may be an excellent example of his bluff being expertly called.

So I have a modest proposal that might sweeten the deal — for all of the Middle East.  It’s as follows:

Seven countries have held out on the international treaty against the use and manufacture of chemical weapons, aka the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those countries are Syria, Israel, Egypt, Angola, Myanmar, South Sudan, and North Korea.  (Two of these — Israel and Myanmar — have signed, but so far, have not yet ratified it.)

So if we’re really serious about banning chemical weapons, and if we’re really serious about the search for some nascent form of Middle East peace (two big ‘ifs,’ but bear with me), we should demand not only that Syria give up its chemical weapons and sign and ratify the treaty, but that at least Israel and Egypt both step up to the plate too.

We should seize the moment and say “Sign here, Mssrs Assad, Netanyahu, and Sisi.”

And we should do it right now.  Before we forget about chemical weapons until the next time they’re used.  Before we leave Assad to keep killing Syrians with conventional weapons.  And before the American public again retreats into its normal state of apathy about anything that happens in countries where the majority are not apple-pie white and Christian.

At least let something good come out of all this horror.

Poet and writer Tamam Kahn had the wit to contrast these two aerial photos of temporary cities — the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan, and the Burning Man encampment in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.  The desperate on the left, the Dionysiac on the right (below).

She also had the fortitude to use the Zaatari one as her screen saver for the past two weeks.

Zaatari, she writes on her blog, is “miles of boxed lives,” with each box a caravan, a prefab shelter, or by now simply a tent.  By last month, the population of the two-year-old camp was 115,000, including 60,000 children.  It is now Jordan’s fourth-largest ‘city.’

Tamam quotes Angelina Jolie on the Syrian refugee crisis, speaking in June: “1.6 million people have poured out of Syria with nothing but the clothes on their back, and more than half of them are children… Every 14 seconds someone crosses Syria’s border and becomes a refugee.”

And she ends her post with this:  “I’m struck with the surreal thought that this is the time Burning Man begins to come together as a desert city — half the size of Zaatari — a celebration of life, way out in the Nevada desert. Two cities: one a sudden city of survival, the other — an enormous party of freedom and excess. Hold them both! I tell myself. May all beings have what they need. May all have shelter, food and clean water, be well, safe, and happy.”

I don’t know why this took me by surprise. Maybe because I’m not a big sci-fi reader — with exceptions made for the likes of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem and William Gibson. And Robert Heinlein and Mary Shelley and H.G.Wells and Ray Bradbury. And Margaret Atwood and Neil Stephenson. And how could I have not led with one of my literary heroes, Jorge Luis Borges? But still, you get my point (I think), which is that I don’t usually think in terms of science fiction becoming applied science.

More fool I.

Last week, Christof Heyns, the man burdened with the unenviable title of “United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions,” called for a global moratorium on the testing, production, and use of armed robots that can select and kill targets without human command.

They are known as “lethal autonomous robots.” And yes, this is indeed a nightmarish killer-robot movie come marching off the screen and into all too non-virtual reality.

Yet the report of Heyns’s call didn’t even make the front page of America’s “newspaper of record.” Soothingly buried on an inside page of the New York Times, and calmingly including the reassurance that such robots weren’t “yet” in production, it elicited little comment. It seems our alarm systems have been lulled by the use of drones, so conveniently deployed halfway round the world in all sorts of places most Americans can’t even find on a map.

Drones, it’s now clear, are only the warm-up stage. Think of lethal autonomous robots as drones with minds of their own. Just program them and set them loose, secure in the knowledge that nothing can possibly go wrong. No way their electronics will go haywire. No way they’ll become just a little bit too autonomous. With the kind of fail-safe electronics that exist only in android dreams, humans can sleep secure. So long as they’re not the targets.

But wait just a moment: who gets to say who the targets are? Who’s going to program the robots? And according to what criteria? Will they be programmed to search out “suspicious behavior,” as human drone operators do? But then what makes behavior suspicious? The skin color of the person doing the behaving? Anyone with a beard? Anyone moving too fast, or maybe too slow? In too large a group or suspiciously alone? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are all over this, leading a new coalition of groups in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, officially launched just two weeks ago.

But it seems to me that an important question to ask here is this: Who is going to be raking in the billions on these robots? Who exactly is doing the research and testing, and will presumably get the huge military contracts? Consider this report last year from San Diego public radio station KPBS on who’s profiting from the $12 billion drone industry (yes, you read the last five words correctly — that’s for the years 2005 to 2011). The top three? How could you possibly not guess? Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. It’s enough to make me ashamed of ever having gotten my pilot’s wings.

And then consider the lengthy, detailed report on the military robot market (mind-numbingly referred to as “Military Ground Robot Mobile Platform Systems of Engagement”) prepared by an outfit called WinterGreen Research. Here, in the kind of mangled grammar that seems to accompany lip-smacking anticipation, is a short extract from the press release:

Even as the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan winds down, automated process implemented as mobile platform systems of engagement are being used to fight terrorists and protect human life. These robots are a new core technology in which all governments must invest. Military ground robot market growth comes from the device marketing experts inventing a new role as technology poised to be effective at the forefront of fighting terrorism. Markets at $4.5 billion in 2013 reach $12.0 billion by 2019. Growth is based on the adoption of automated process by military organizations worldwide.

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob.  It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs.  I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness.  Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

————————————————————

Later:  novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page.  Here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we [I’m assuming he means US policy-makers — LH] sort of agree with this bozo.”