Short & Sweet

Tonight's offering will be short and sweet. It has been a week filled with events and circumstances that have kept me from writing much. The column began earlier in the week will not be forthcoming since we will never be able to meet Ian's deadline. And woe be to him who misses a deadline at DMY. Actually, I don't have a clue about the amount of woe involved, just a nagging fear that drawing and quartering are still in vogue.

Of course you can check out our contribution over at http://politicalpulpit.com or read an essay that gives sage advice to rising middle schoolers here at the start of the school year http://expage.com/lukester272. This one will probably make you uncomfortable if you are a teacher, administrator, politician, or, heaven forbid, a parent. But it isn't written for you. It's for the kids.

A few years ago I argued that since we live in a society which puts a premium on cheating, duplicity, lying, and dishonesty, we ought to reward the kid who cheats in school because he is simply preparing himself for the realities of adult life. The angry emails flowed in. I have more angry emails to answer from last week's column on the craven, yet unnamed, nation whose last great national hero was a guy named Vercingetorix. I used to use a 'take no prisoners' approach, but we have mellowed in recent months.

"Luke", went one letter this week, "Will you ever write about Laci Peterson or Kobe Bryant?" The answer is no. Unqualified. No. I prefer to stay away from these media driven legal circuses. One of our favorite family video tapes is a shot of Pop, at his bar in the old Cellar, a nightclub he and brother Rob owned in the 1990's, years before I knew him. One of the O.J. Simpson trials had ended that day and the verdict delivered. A TV reporter came in, stuck a cam in his face, and asked "Do you agree with today's verdict?"

Pop, never at a loss for words, hoisted himself up to his full and unimpressive height, fixed the camera with the same baleful stare he used to scare the crapola out of me when I was little, and said, simply, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Like Pop and Clark Gable, I will choose to ignore media driven legal actions as well as the antics of brain-dead, Hollywoody super stars.

Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of the horrific evens of 9/11. At that one point in time, as happened on 12/07/41, the United States became aware it was at war. But in both cases the actually war began many years before. The destruction of the twin towers was simply the seminal event that rubbed our noses in the amount of hatred of All Things American found in the Middle East.

We can probably blame the Crusades, of course, many Arabs do. Our enemies are, in a word, Muslim Fundamentalists. Sorry, there is no way to sugarcoat this simple fact. As Germans, Japanese, and Italians were our avowed foes in 1941, so are angry Arabs, Arabs willing to die and kill to bring about what they consider the will of Allah in 2003. We didn't lose 3,000 people to Swedes or Spaniards, nor to Bolivians or Poles. We did not have our financial district all but ruined by Chrsitians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, or Shintos. We lost them to nineteen young, idealistic Arab men, fifteen or sixteen of whom were Saudi Arabians, conservative Muslims all. The Saudis are our allies, in theory; in actuality, despite their claims to the contrary, many influential Saudis are America's sworn enemies: both the brains and the money behind so much of the Anti Western action taking place in the Middle East.

A couple of things come to mind here. Any gut-wrenching, self-recrimination is not useful. Since we are in a state of war, of total war, we need to put aside idiotic feelings that we are somehow to blame for 9/11, and get on with the business of winning the damn thing. If this means killing Arabs, so be it. They kill us, we kill them, they respect brute force almost as much as they do the Imams' version of the Will of Allah. We have to continue to show that we are strong and unyielding, that we have the will to win. Not winning could signal the end of Western Civilization. This is simply not acceptable.

Of course we have to show that we are compassionate. This is why our soldiers in Iraq spend much of their time rebuilding schools, hospitals, museums, libraries�the places that are the nuts and bolts of culture. Our media has been less than balanced in its coverage of contributions, preferring to emphasize the deaths of United States soldiers and photo ops of youngsters screaming threats of death, waving AK-47's, and sending us the universal single digit salute. Tough first, compassionate second, the war is winnable.

When we hear words like 'quagmire', we must be cautious. The current press corps cut its eye teeth on the war in Viet Nam, a conflict we should never have entered in the first place, and never fought to win. We found ourselves in a quagmire in Southeast Asia because and mainly because we lacked the national will to succeed.

But the Cong never attacked us in our own back yard. The Muslim has. The situation is very different. A total war has been declared by others beyond our own borders. It is a war which can and must be won.

Personally, I trust the media about as much as I do our politicians, politicians of any stripe.

That's about it for this week. Again, we apologize for the brevity. Forget the hype tomorrow, the hype centering on 9/11. Remember simply the innocent folks who perished. Remember, too, who killed them.

THIS JUST IN: The Saudi Government has banned Barbi Dolls. Don't know whether to praise or condemn this action.

Luke Angelo
Macon, Georgia
Where we have had about two-dozen major bomb threats in the last week.

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Luke Angelo, Cyberbrat Out Of Hell, lives in Macon, GA, where he regularly causes trouble and proves that the pen is far mightier than the Mayor