Pearl - Today's the anniversary

Pearl - Today's the anniversary of Daniel Pearl's murder.

Lileks has a great Bleat on the subject. Here's one of two money clips:

Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said "The US is a nation out of control," and “unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world." He said America was "a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug."

When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line.

It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache - and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.

The other:

every so often - say, when you’re standing in the aisle of Target, woolgathering, recalling something you heard on the radio on the way over, or read on the web that morning, and you see headlines: Israel retaliates; Syrian forces push south or Smallpox appears contained, for now and you wonder whether this simple trivial moment will seem unutterably precious in six months, or three - and then you shake it off, and buy Tupperware. Another normal February day.

March is named after which Roman god? Yes, yes. Of course.

It is, indeed, interesting to read things written before 9/11; my own diary, magazines, even peoples' weblogs. I often wonder - what will these days look like in a year? Like looking at peoples' diaries in 1938? The uncertainty, the political maneuvering, the thundering jeremiads from left and right...

I need to bookmark some of these things.

Posted by Mitch at February 21, 2003 07:31 PM