Peter Krupa

At the risk of destroying any chance I might have of winning public office in the near future: Can someone please tell me why Americans spend so much time worrying about terrorism? I’m really impressed how often the topic comes up in all sorts of contexts in U.S. discourse, despite the absence of a sustained pattern of terrorist attacks.

The State Department loves to label distasteful governments/groups - Syria, FARC, North Korea - as “terrorist” or “state sponsors of terror” as if that somehow makes them ideological allies. Occasionally I run across chintzy action TV shows and movies where beefcake characters express their desire to go out and kill “terrorists,” as if such a status were self evident.

Meanwhile the Office of Motherland Homeland Security (tagline: Preserving Our Freedoms) spends billions of dollars every year on weird grants designed to defend against evil in terrorism hotspots like Annapolis, Maryland.

“Since 9/11, tourist areas are targeted by terrorists… ” Sgt. Johnson said. “Annapolis is the capital of Maryland. These days, I guess anything can happen anywhere.

Right! Except these days, nothing is happening anywhere! Spooks and State Department bureaucrats will tell us, hey, we’ve foiled tons of plots since 9/11, and you snot-nosed kids don’t even realize what kind of stuff has almost killed you in the last seven years.

But with the U.S. government’s track record, if hordes of terrorist boogymen really had been trying to blow up the Homeland since 9/11, at least one of them would have succeeded. Really, it can’t be that hard. Also, keep in mind that the people “protecting” us are the same ones who’ve been lying to us since the Mexican-American War, so frankly, I’m not buying it.

The truly interesting thing is how Cold War terminology has carried over into the 21st Century. The American imagination has been encouraged to think in terms of anti-Western “-isms.” Today we have simply flipped one “ideological” threat (communist, communism) for another one (terrorist, terrorism). Seriously, next time you hear a commentator or politician talking about the threat of “terrorism,” just insert the c-word. Suddenly, it’s 1962 all over again.

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed Wall-E. And at the risk of hyperbole, I think someday, a decade or two from now, people will look back at this movie as a cultural turning point. How can I say this… Wall-E feels like it was made by a different generation. By a generation that grew up tinkering with computers and treasuring a past it never experienced. Not to get all Obama-y, but Wall-E somehow felt like the Babyboomers had been locked out of the studio. I’d be curious to hear what other people thought.

If you haven’t been following the Betancourt/Colombian military/FARC/dramatic Hollywood rescue saga, Simon Romero has an excellent round-up in the New York Times this morning. The official version is that the Colombian military tricked the FARC into putting their prize hostages onto two “international mission”-looking helicopters that appeared to be of Venezuelan origin. In reality, they were Colombian military. The operation rescued a handful of high-profile hostages and made the FARC look ridiculous.

The thing is, it’s all just a little too perfect. Uribe is coming off as a national hero just at the moment when he must decide whether to make the legally-sketchy move of running for a third term. Some Swedish radio station is saying that the “rescue” was really a ransom, paid by the U.S., of $20 million. While I’m not inclined to believe Swedish radio stations per se, it seems really likely that something “extra” is going on.

Either that, or Colombians are just total bad-asses. Which, you know, is also kind of true.

Here’s a great, inadvertent example of why newspapers are going out of business. Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, publishes a profile in a recent issue of Portfolio on god-like media blogger Jim Romenesko. He concludes, rather presumptively, about a third of the way into the piece:

Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product - verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

The arrogance of this paragraph is toe-curling, this idea that the only place one can get “quality information” is from newspapers, and you poor, stupid pleebs on the Interwebs just don’t even realize you need an editor to wipe your ass and tell you what to read. People like Raines are seriously out of touch.

In one of the creepiest videos I’ve seen in some time, Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded in what looks like a garage in Naperville, Illinois. He lasts about 15 seconds. In the post-op interview, some days later, he is visibly shaken, and says he has begun having nightmares. Kudos to Hitch - more pundits should try out the things they gab about. Politicians too.

NB - I’m presently reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The brutality and incompetence of the whole thing is at once embarrassing and scary, as well as (in post-9/11 retrospect) not at all surprising.