So I spent most of a week with my 18 year old son, and other than worrying about the usual parental concerns (Does he have enough condoms? Does he understand his school’s sexual harassment policy? WTF is he doing with a tobacco pipe?), being with him makes we think about our immediate future and so about terrorism.
If you have read this blog at all, you know that I’m no friend of Hamas or any of the other alphabet-soup of Islamists up and to Bin Laden the Asimov-reading nutjob who destroyed the World Trade Center. I don’t believe that a Palestinian state is the answer at this point, nor have I excused terror as the inevitable consequence of oppression.
But being with my son made me worry, both about the impacts on my sons’ futures of not doing anything about terrorism, and about the cost in young lives (like my son’s) of doing something. And when I worry, I think.
First, let me set the stage.
I think that we’re headed into some dark times. While many in the world are better off than they have ever been, they are also plugged in enough to know how much more others have than they do. And the key to resentment isn’t absolute deprivation, but relative. Add to that the global mobility…of money, people, goods…and we in the U.S. are tied closer than ever to a world population that not only resents us for our wrongdoings (such as they may be) but for simply living the lives we lead every day.
I think, as does Kevin Phillips, that we are a late-stage empire, and that the habits that brought us our power and wealth are becoming weakened. There’s good and bad in that; I don’t mean to judge them normatively, but rather to use them in a way that offers a theory of what the medium-term future – my sons’ future – may look like.
Now, let me talk about terrorism.
I’ve been reading a lot about terrorism, and a lot of the rhetoric about it has finally begun to gel in my head.
Most broadly, terrorism is the use of violence against civilian targets in a manner designed to create fear and so to drive a political action home.
It has been the subject of much debate and many competing definitions. A few include:

“Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought” (Schmid, 1988).
From U.N Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention
…the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). That statute contains the following definitions:
The term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant (1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.
From U.S. Navy Department Library

So what we have are three core features:
1) Violence against civilians
2) Violence for nonmilitary purposes
3) Violence by a subnational or clandestine group
Let’s go through these. Violence against civilians ought to be obvious…soldiers wear uniforms, drive marked behicles, etc. etc. But there are gradations. There is a profound difference between attacking the Speaker of the House and attacking his grocer in order to frighten him. [Inserted: Both are civilians, but one occupies a role that is both functional and ceremonial in the leadership of the country and by extension, our military capacity.] If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don’t advocate this, Ann, please don’t get any ideas…). You’d be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you’d be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.
This fits into 2), the concept of violence for nonmilitary purposes. Let’s look back at WWII and strategic bombing. There was a huge difference between bombing factories in the Ruhr, or bombing railroads…the destruction of which would have degraded the ability of Germany to fight…and bombing Dresden, which was designed to frighten German citizens. Attacking the armed forces of an enemy, or the resources on which the armed forced depend to fight has a legitimacy which simply killing the civilians of the enemy lacks.
And finally, 3) the question of identifiable combatants. There are two justifications for the clear identification of soldiers; first because we morally believe in ‘fighting fair’, and the notion that we have to take the reactions from our actions is important; but more importantly, because if enemy combatants are hiding among the civilian population and killing my soldiers, one very likely outcome involves the wholesale slaughter of the enemy civilian population in order to kill the hidden combatants.
In my life, there have been three waves of terrorism:
1) Undeclared and declared wars of national liberation. Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Ulster, Sri Lanka. In each of these, the tactics of terror were used to combat a colonial power, in the interest of founding an independent nation.
2) Western middle-class terrorists; what I’ll call “academic” terrorism. Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground (how pathetic is it that the Germans and Japanese grew better middle-class terrorists than we did?), on to groups and individuals I’ll suggest stand in the same continuum but without the overt politics…Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, the SLA, and Columbine.
3) Palestinian and other Arab terrorism. From Munich to Lockerbie, the secular Arab nationalist movements (note that the Islamist movements have been relatively free from terrorism…the capture of the American Embassy arguably was an action against ‘combatants’) have attacked Israel and secondarily Western countries that have supported Israel.
In the next part, I want to try and make some connections between these three waves, and to try and outline a theory of the connection and progress of terrorism, with some disturbing suggestions about its future.

Every day my local, small-town, Republican newspaper has a historic quote on the front page. Today’s got my attention…

I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
-Benjamin Harrison

We were lucky enough to have dinner Sunday with Dave Trowbridge, his lovely and incredibly talented partner Deborah Ross, her daughter and friend, Ann Salisbury and friend, and briefly, Steve Den Beste. It was great to talk with all of them, and I walked away again impressed at the luck that I’ve had since starting this through the people I’ve met physically and electronically.
We rode a motorcycle down, since anyone who knows Southern California can tell you how awful the traffic is on the 405 on a Sunday afternoon and evening. Remarking on this, Dave commented that he’d recently seen a motorcyclist die on Highway 9 near his home, and that he’d written about it.
Here’s what he wrote:

Tuesday night, as I drove home from work along Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz mountains, I passed a dying man lying at the side of the road. I couldn’t know at the time that he was dying, although I thought it likely, for his kind die weekly on our roads during the summer. He was surrounded by his friends, and there was nothing I could do, so I drove on.
But the next day, on my way to work, I knew his fate, for where he had lain were the spidery orange lines of spray paint left by the Highway Patrol investigator, and some hyacinths planted in the embankment, surrounded by cut flowers still in the florist’s plastic sheaths, there in the deep shade of a redwood forest where such flowers never grow, much less bloom, except on the occasion of violent death.
He was a young man, I suppose, for his hobby is not for the old. Or, rather, those that persist in it usually do not reach a great age. He was a café racer, or so we call them here in the mountains, naming them for the low-slung motorcycles they ride. If you drive the mountains, you will have seen them, blurred harlequins in their riding leathers flashing by, hugging the center line or even crossing it, impatient with the slower pace of four-wheeled traffic. Theirs is a dance of the physics of untreaded rubber and asphalt, the fragile vector between the inertial ghost of centrifugal acceleration and the pull of gravity, first one knee and then the other almost brushing the rushing road beneath them as they follow the highway’s weaving path in an ecstasy of speed that has no teleology but the moment…

And both his comments and his writing cut close to home, in a way that’s more impressive because usually when outsiders write about something you know you may admire the writing or the ideas, but they get it fundamentally wrong. Dave didn’t (well, the tires have treads…but that’s a nit).
In the last six years, three people (one of whom was a very close friend) I know have died sportriding (riding motorcycles quickly on mountain roads). Dozens of others have been injured, usually mildly, thank Someone. And my partner, my significant other, my fiancee has had two trips to the hospital engendered by her own over-enthusiastic riding.
And yesterday, I was riding hard through the hills above Ojai helping test and review some motorcycles for a friend.
Hang on, there’s a point. Actually, two.
First and foremost, there’s this: People have some right to be stupid. I said earlier:

There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.

The more we take freedom and responsibility away from people, the less responsible and more dependent people we will help create. People want to be free, they want responsibility for themselves and others. And so in doing so…in banning fast motorcycles, or fast food…you begin to create the rust that will eventually corrode away our society and government. That rust exists. It is deep and powerful. But the metal underneath it…the structural steel that holds our society and the government of our contry together…is still strong.
For now.
The second is that while it’s great to advocate the freedom to be stupid, there is also an obligation to minimize the risks to yourself and others, to act responsibly, in other words. This is a gospel I preach most of the places I go, whether in the shooting community, motorcycling community, or, for that matter in politics and other public spheres. Your actions have consequences on you and on the people around you. And to the extent that you decide to simply ignore those consequences…to ride beyond your capabilities or beyond what is remotely safe for the conditions you are in, or in a way that infuriates the other legitimate users of a road or a community…then you are abusing your freedom, not building it, and someone is likely to take it away from you.
Rights and responsibilities are inseparable. It is meaningless to talk about one without the other: to have rights, implies that you are an actor, not an object.
Actors have responsibility. Period.

…and boy, am I behind. Haven’t had a chance to catch up on blogs or news yet; will try and do some in the next day or so. Have been thinking hard about terrorism through history, and came to some surprising conclusions. As soon as they get set (sort of) articulately down in pixels, I’ll post them.
Lots of reading to do.

9/10/02: Visitors from InstaPundit: I’m not Steve Skubinna. He was a frequent commenter here, and someone I thought highly of even before this.

On a plane tomorrow at 0-dark-30 for Dulles, then down to Charlottesville, where I’ll help the Biggest Guy get out of his apt, and into a dorm room. I’m ass-u-ming I’ll have access and time to read and blog a bit, but it may be sketchy. Back Saturday. Please don’t blow anything up while I’m gone…

(from Blog Critics)
Hot Rod Circuit Sorry About Tomorrow/Vagrant
Part of what is so cool about music is that it evokes place so well. Listen. Go put on a Springsteen or U2 disc; where are you? A stadium, packed shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Leni Riefenstahl collective human mass. Put on Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello and suddenly you’re in a church.
My weakness is for the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re leaning against the cigarette-grimed wall of a small club, a bottle of cold beer in your hand, as you shout to try and talk to the person next to you. There are a lot of subclasses here…you may be dodging chairs thrown from the mosh pit, or listening to synthesizers while watching clips from 50’s TV projected on the wall, or actually dancing, as opposed to bobbing up and down in place, to a hard-edged update of Bob Wills…but the sweet spot is a band with 2 guitars, bass, and drums. The singer is a tortured intellectual with a reedy, slightly sharp voice who sings smart-sounding lyrics, and the guitars phase back and forth between a buzz of noise and melody.
Some of my favorite bands sound sort of like that; Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pursuit of Happiness, Thirteen Engines, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and now Hot Rod Circuit.
So call me a sucker for this style. Put the disc in and go open a Bud. You’ll be transported back to every little rock club you’ve ever been to; feel all the edgy insecurity you felt being there, as well as that adolescent hunger for something more than sex that brought you there in the first place.
BOOK REVIEW
(also, surprisingly enough, from Blog Critics)
‘A Brief History of the Flood’ by Jean Harfenist
…disclaimer; I know the author. But I know several other authors with books out and you don’t see me talking about them…
I’m a city boy, raised under the brilliant glow of success and possibility which I saw everywhere around me. This is a novel about someone who grew up in a place where possibility was barely a faint glimmer on the horizon.
It’s a novel – there is a character, Lillian Anderson, who undergoes trial and changes as we watch. But it’s written as a linked set of short stories (think Susan Minot) and so is episodic. Each of the stories closes you in more and more tightly, and in each one you see Lillian struggling harder and harder to get out. Unlike Ray Carver, who similarly wrote about isolated people on questionable roads, the love and respect the author has for these real characters comes through. But not at the expense of an acid point of view: “My sister is the kind of girl who thinks letting Buddy Franklin fuck her in the Hoffmans’ hayloft is the same thing as a date”
It’s a modern Huckleberry Finn, with the modern demons…family rage, the limits of class…replacing the more-concrete demons…bandits, slave-catchers…that Huck and Jim faced together. But both the characters – Huck and Lillian – share a saucy grit that pulls you toward them, and makes you know that wherever they are today, their demons are at least a little bit behind them. And because of that, the book matters.

Not intentionally, but telling nontheless. From the Washington Post, an article about styles of argument. Style #9:

The author was a scoundrel. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that he wrote a bad book, but that has never stopped critics hoping to find that elusive philosopher’s stone that connects personal misbehavior with bad art. The best practitioner of this form of mudslinging is the surviving spouse of the scoundrel, who is best able to paint an intimate picture of the beast. After the spouse lays out the ammunition, professional critics step in and “reconsider” the author’s work, looking for evidence of suppressed rage, wife-beating, child abuse and addiction. Then the all-important sleight of hand: connecting personal weakness to artistic weakness. “So is Nietzsche’s philosophy really no more than a coded confession of secret experiences?” asks a recent New York Times review of a book that examines Nietzsche’s supposed homosexuality. The conclusion, at the end, is no, he was human and he had ideas. But the reviewer raises the specter of a damning accusation: that the philosopher is really just a memoirist, dealing not with ideas but with repetitive personal obsessions. Just raising the idea for 800 words is usually enough to be sure some mud sticks.

This squares with my belief that [fill in the name of the writer/ actor/ composer/ whatever] may have been an asshole, but damn I do love the work.
I don’t have to live with him or her. He didn’t abuse me as a child, she didn’t beat me with coathangers. It is of some slight interest that they advocated parboiling children, or wound up dying poor, divorced, syphilitic, and advocating random acts of violence.
It is the work that matters. I’m building a body of work here that people can do what they will with. Someday, I would like to tie it into the other things I do and have done with my life. But right now, what you see is what you get.

Demosthenes builds on Nathan Newman’s post on the Democratic accomplishments of the last few years, and adds this:

To be honest, it’s just a logical fallacy to say that the Dems (in their entirety) are no different than the Republicans (in their entirety), and the Greens are pretty obviously trying a “invasion from the margin” attack (where a third party takes over an increasingly large group from the margins of a party in a two-party system, until the party it’s trying to eliminate is left only with moderates and eventually drops out of sight), but it’s still worth proving that Democrats are Democrats.

First, as to all this, I really wish that Nathan, who I respect and is on my blogroll, had done more than give an unattributed link to Ann Salisbury, who did the original list on her great blog, Two tears in a Bucket.
Next, I’ve discussed this myself almost endlessly, but the money quote is this one:

[there are]…two different sets of issues, which are rooted in our political ecology.
One set are substantive, and have to do with policy, governance, and what exactly we want the government to do…in my case, offer great day care, have a moderately progressive tax code, etc. etc. … the other set are procedural, and have to do with how the government makes decisions and constitutes itself.
Substantively, I stand with the liberal side of the house (with a few wrinkles on guns and foreign policy).
But procedurally, I think that the mainstream liberal and conservative actors are indistinguishable, and I have a huge problem with them and with the process that maintains them.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: There is a huge structural problem with the way we think about and conduct politics in this country, and more than anything, it continues to result in piss-poor elected officials, laws, policies, and in the increasing loss of legitimacy that I believe is far more important than which set of lobbyists’ issues get promoted this week (while still believing in fact that some lobbyists have better claims than others).

Check this out!!
Launch is tomorrow…I’ll try and do some linking…