Op-Ed

Osama bin Laden has once again managed to occupy the stage and to insist on his relevance to the story of September 11, 2001. In his most recent video message, released by Reuters a few days before the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, bin Laden voiced some typically absurd statements, calling on Americans to embrace Islam and so forth.

What is really worth noting in bin Laden's message, however, is not the message itself, but the underlying factors that can be deduced from it. First, bin Laden wished to convey that he is alive and well and thus the US military efforts have failed miserably.

Second, his reappearance - a first since October 2004 - will be analyzed endlessly by hundreds of "experts" who will inundate widespread audiences with every possible interpretation - the fact that he looked healthy, that he dyed his beard, that he dressed in Arab attire as opposed to a military fatigue and a Kalashnikov by his side, that he read from a paper and so on.

When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly referred to “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government,” he had no way of knowing that his description would ring so true 40 years later. As the autumn of 2007 begins, the reality of Uncle Sam as an unhinged mega-killer haunts a large minority of Americans. Many who can remember the horrific era of the Vietnam War are nearly incredulous that we could now be living in a time of similarly deranged official policy.

     Despite all the differences, the deep parallels between the two war efforts inform us that the basic madness of entrenched power in our midst is not about miscalculations or bad management or quagmires. The continuity tells us much more than we would probably like to know about the obstacles to decency that confront us every day.

     The incredulity and numbing, the frequent bobbing-and-weaving of our own consciousness, the hollow comforts of passivity, insulate us from hard truths and harsher realities than we might ever have expected to need to confront -- about our country and about ourselves.

Six years it has been. Six years so very long ago, and six years still very short.

A child born that terrible blue sky morning prepares this September to head off to school. A freshman made suddenly aware the meaning of real terror after living only in terror of her first days at high school is now an upperclassman at college. A sixteen acre hole in the heart of a nation slowly fills with concrete and rebar, a sky-scraping phoenix soon to rise from the ashes.

Six years in which so very much is different, and six years in which too much is the same.

We all remember where we were and what we felt on the morning of September 11th, 2001, when calamity glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky. We remember the feelings of fear and trembling, of sadness and loss. Most of all we remember the images, the so many awful images indelibly seared on our souls.

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited "9/11," a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight -- giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

     Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you’re more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you’re more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.

It's hard to keep up with the crazed weather. As I write, a heat wave has killed over 50 people in the Midwest and South, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees in Evening Shade, Arkansas. Torrential storms have flooded Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota. California has its second largest wildfire ever. Texas and Kansas are battening down for new storms, while still recovering from last month's floods, along with Oklahoma, which is now getting flooded again. A few weeks before, a massive rainstorm closed down the New York City subways. That doesn't count over 2,000 dead and millions displaced in India and Bangladesh floods, runaway forest fires in Greece, the hottest-ever temperature in Japan, or unprecedented melting of Arctic icecaps. Tomorrow the weather will ricochet off the charts someplace else.

Are you here to communicate your own view, that of the White House, or both?

Please name all the people with whom you have had communications in preparing for this testimony.

What does the White House expect from your testimony?

Are you submitting a written report to this Congress?  Did you ever plan to do so?  What changed your mind?

Are you submitting a written report to the White House?  Why not?

Are you aware that the President is required by law to submit a written report on progress in Iraq to this Congress by September 15th?  Have you been or do you expect to be involved in the preparation of that report? 

Are you aware that it is a felony to intentionally mislead or defraud the Congress, for example in the manner the White House did in making its case for this war in 2003?

Do you feel completely free to speak openly and honestly with us here today?

What do you believe is the ultimate goal of the current occupation of Iraq? 

Do you believe that goal can ever be achieved?

How long would you estimate it would take?

I spent a day meeting with Congress Members and their staffers, urging them to end the occupation of Iraq, and having them tell me they would never "defund our troops."  In the evening I watched Paul Haggis's new film "In the Valley of Elah."  I walked out stunned, shaken, far more angry than I'd been, and convinced that we shouldn't be asking Congress Members to end the occupation, we should be asking them to watch this movie.  If any Congress Member were to watch this movie and allow another dime to "fund our troops" we would at least be clear in our duty to have that individual locked up for the safety of those around them.

Joseph Stephen Zoretic December 25, 1968 to August 27, 2007

The Ohio Patient Network was quite saddened to learn of the untimely death of one of our founding members, Joe Zoretic. On Monday, August 27, 2007, Joe suffered a massive heart attack that resulted from an undiagnosed heart condition. Residing with his family in Lakewood, Ohio, he was 38 years old.

Joseph Stephen Zoretic was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 25, 1968.  He spent his elementary years in nearby Maple Heights and high school years in Parma. He worked for Sabre Enterprises of Cleveland for 13 years as a Cold Header / Machinist.

Joe met the love of his life, wife Dee Dee, in fall of 1989, and the two were married on November 27, 1992. They have one son Stephen who was born in 1993.

The poster exploits the howling demons of our culture. It’s my morning smack-in-the-eye, bright gold, four feet high, dominated by a female in stark silhouette striding resolutely into the wreckage of post-apocalypse Las Vegas. She wields a wicked-looking blaster in each hand.

The ad, for the movie “Resident Evil: Extinction,” occupies the spot on the elevated train platform where I await the start of my daily commute to work. This is not a movie I’m going to see, but I can’t avoid feeling the impact of its throbbing message: Justice cometh, and she has a nice butt, and she’s armed.

Wow. The gears mesh — yet again! — on the perfect delusion. For entertainment, we hop ourselves up on sex and road rage, and fantasy bleeds into reality. The result is an armed, frightened society and a high-tech war on terror that promises to cut a terrible swath of destruction across the planet before it runs out of, so to speak, gas.

Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Sept. 5, you’d never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States -- “everyone loves seeing us tied down here” -- stuck in the “madness that is Iraq.” And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis “if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”

     The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.