QOTD: "The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won't get much sleep." - Woody Allen
Reading: Diane Souhami, Selkirk's Island
Listening to: Hamza El Din, A Wish
Decluttering accomplishments: wrote Rosh Hashanah cards and even mailed most of them, got about a third of the way through the stack of papers from my nightstand
First, a quick erratum. I was wrong about Nigeria. The sectarian violence there actually broke out about a week before the terrorist attacks in the U.S. and those attacks were just an excuse for escalation. Sigh.
As far as actual news, I was particularly happy to be out of the office for Tuesday and Wednesday (due to Rosh Hashanah). Not that I hate work so much - and I was actually sorry to miss the training that we'd had interrupted last week - but the increased security is stressful. I recognize that it's important and I make a point of thanking the security police. But it makes it harder to get back to normal.
Anyway, I did accomplish a fair bit during the days I was in the office, including almost getting through the draft of a white paper I've been working on. I also had an interview over the phone for a transfer within the company. It wouldn't normally have been over the phone, but corporate travel is restricted now. I think it went OK, but not swimmingly, partly because of the weirdness of doing it over the phone. It was also obvious that the person who was interviewing me had taken one of those classes on how to ask probing questions. (For example, he asked things like, "can you give me an example of a time you used creativity in the solution of a problem?" Which is, I suppose, a step up from "where do you see yourself in five years?" but, still... sheesh.)
Before I move on to the main thing I wanted to write about, I have a few brief other things to say back on the subject of the terrorist attacks. The first is that I've realized that I have a particular horror of dying in a manner that my body would not be identifiable. Maybe that's something everyone experiences, out of the general realization that leaving that uncertainty for family and friends would be awful. I think that, in my case, I feel it particularly because that's what happened to so many of my ancestors just a couple of generations ago.
Which brings me to the second thing I want to mention. It's been a long time (nearly 16 years) since my father died, but it's under these circumstances that I most wish he were still around. He managed to survive the horrors of the Kovno Ghetto and Dachau and still be a sane person, with a great sense of humor. I couldn't get through more than four pages of the Newsweek special edition on the terrorist attacks at a time without falling apart. I really wish I could just talk to my Dad and get his perspective.
My favorite news story had to do with brisk sales of Usama Bin Laden's picture in Liberia. That sounded sinister from the headline, but the explanation was that "the whole world is looking for him and Liberia is part of the whole world." The pride at the idea that a Liberian might be the one to capture him (unlikely as it is) was fascinating.
My least favorite story was the NPR report about attacks and harassment of Muslims (and Sikhs). They interviewed a Pakistani man (a permanent resident of the U.S.) who had boarded a plane a few days ago to go to Pakistan for his brother's wedding. He was sitting in first class. After a brief delay, the pilot came back and told him to get off because he (the pilot) felt they weren't safe with him on board. All Delta told him was to try again the next day. Delta's response was that they were investigating the incident. I could deal with it if they'd given extra scrutiny to him and his bags - not entirely happily, but I could deal with it. But outright kicking him off the plane outrages me. The man in question seemed to be taking it fairly well. He called his brother and just said his flight was cancelled, which is a much calmer response than most of us would have made. Sigh.
The last tidbit I had before the main event is that I'm finding the comments on the difficulty of fighting in Afghanistan to be intriguing. I've never heard Kipling quoted so frequently as I have in the past few days! I'm waiting for somebody or other to bring up Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was so much a player in the "great game." They've certainly repeated the horrors of the British retreat from Kabul, in which only one person, out of nearly 17 thousand, survived. The single most dramatic statement, though, is the claim that the last person to successfully lead an army across Afghanistan was Alexander the Great.
As for the main thing I wanted to say, I was lying in bed last night and I suddenly came up with the perfect metaphor for the fight against terrorism. It's the second labor of Hercules. (Go ahead and look it up - I'll wait. A good source for the legend is from the Perseus Project at Tufts.) After dusting off the Nemean lion, Hercules was sent off to Lerna, to kill the hydra. Aside from the minor indignities of the beast coiling itself around his body as he fought and enlisting a huge crab to gnaw at the hero's trapped foot, Hercules had to deal with this little property of the hydra that nobody had bothered to mention beforehand. They had told him it had poisonous venom, they had told him it had incredibly bad breath, one or two folks might even have mentioned the coiling itself around the body trick. But nobody had bothered to warn Hercules that each time he chopped off a head (and the hydra was a firm believer in the motto that "nine heads are better than one"), two would grow back in its place. So he chopped away and more heads grew. Finally, he figured out that what he was doing wasn't working and got his assistant/charioteer/nephew, Iolaus, to burn the neck each time he chopped off a head. That worked well enough, except for the last head, which happened to be immortal. But everybody knows you can take care of immortal evils by burying them under rocks (to be turned over centuries later in Sunnydale, California), so that wasn't much of a setback at all.
And that's just what I think we're getting ourselves into it. I think we have to - the poisonous serpent is already rearing its heads out of the swamps and devouring our world. But we are going to have to be prepared to be entangled and mired, to have new heads arise as we destroy the old ones and, in the end, to be satisfied with having merely buried, but not completely destroyed the beast.
And remember that Hercules still had ten labors to go at the end of all that. Including cleaning out the Augean stables.
Copyright 2001 Miriam H. Nadel