Where do we go from here? There’s still so much we don’t know. The most important thing we don’t know is who is behind the suicidal hijackings that caused so much horror and grief Tuesday.
We do know this was no Tim McVeigh, no Ted Kaczynski. What happened Tuesday could not have been the work of a disaffected loner, but was carried out by a very motivated and coordinated group of people.
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How would you feel if it got back to you that people were saying you had a “one-track” mind? I suppose you could make the best of it and consider it a compliment. Having a “one-track” mind could mean you are a focused, tenacious person, who sees a job through to the end. Still, you’d have to admit, “one-track” mind isn’t much of a compliment. It would sound better if people just came out and called you “focused and tenacious.”
Think of the image that gave birth to the “one-track” description. One railroad track, stretching off to the horizon. No alternatives for getting from Point A to Point B. There’s one track through the Howard Street tunnel in Baltimore, Maryland. The tunnel is 1.7 miles long and opened in 1895. The Howard Street tunnel passes right by Orioles Park at Camden Yards and serves an average of 30 trains per day. It’s an important link on the eastern corridor’s rail system, and as I said, it’s one track wide.
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I’m speaking to you from the deck of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Salem, Massachusetts, a town famous for burning things. Three hundred years ago it was witches, for the last 40 years it’s been coal – 2,000 tons a day, in an electric power plant owned now by Pacific Gas and Electric. Pacific Gas and Electric? In Salem, Massachusetts, on the Atlantic? That’s right, the same company that that gave rolling blackouts to California, the same company that was the villain in “Erin Brockovich.”
Part of this is about deregulation, about some of the worst regional power companies taking their tactics nationwide. Part of this is about global warming, the Kyoto Treaty and the Bush administration. George W. Bush and company are walking away from the rest of the world when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions. Much is made – and rightly so – of Mr. Bush’s connections to the oil industry, but oil is not the only fossil fuel contributing to global warming. Coal is also a primary source of CO2. Salem’s coal-burning power plant had been scheduled to burn less and less coal, switching to cleaner fuels over time. Until the election, that is. Now PG&E is talking about investing another $400 million in coal technology for Salem.
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Perhaps the oldest American argument divides those who believe in the power of a strong federal government and those who believe in decentralization, with power residing, not in Washington, but in the states. Alexander Hamilton, patron saint of the Republican Party, called for a central government, Thomas Jefferson, patron of the Democrats, wanted power dispersed. Neither man got exactly what he wanted in the founding of the Republic; as the nation lurched forward through the decades, the question was deferred.
Eighty years later, the issue of states’ rights was the fuse that lit the powder keg of the Civil War. In the recent debates over the proper method for displaying the Confederate flag, apologists for the old south argued that the Civil War was not about slavery at all, but was an ideological and philosophical battle over states’ rights. They’re right – up to a point. The Civil War was fought over the question of whether states had the right to secede from the union. Southern states wanted to secede from the union because the federal government wanted to limit slavery. States’ rights may have been the window dressing, but the war was about slavery.
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Have you heard of the Patagonian Toothfish? Probably not. It lives far away, in cold water at the bottom of the world, south of Australia, around Antarctica, near the southern tip of South America, the land called Patagonia, which lends its name to the fish.
The Patagonian Toothfish is a carnivore, it eats other fish. In the deep waters of the southern oceans, the Patagonian Toothfish fills the same niche in the food web that is elsewhere filled by sharks.
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Carlo Giuliani, the young man killed by police at the recent Group of Eight meeting in Genoa, has been called the “first person to die in anti-globalization protests,” but this is untrue. Any number of people have already be killed by police in developing nations – Indonesia and India, to name two.
It’s easy to see the journalists’ dilemma: there lies the corpse of Mr. Giuliani, shot in the head, run over, blood pooling in the street of the ancient port city. He’s dead; the fact must be reported. A sharp-eyed editor points out that, no, Mr. Giuliani was not the first person to be killed while protesting the world-sweeping grasp of the multinational corporations, but those other poor peoples’ deaths were never reported. If we want to be accurate, we’ll have to insert three awkward parenthetical paragraphs, or worse, run a sidebar on all those people whose massacres we never reported in the first place. What a waste of news space, plus we give ourselves a black eye in the process. “Oh hell,” the managing editor barks, “just call him the ‘first person to die in anti-globalization protests’ and be done with it.”
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Charlie Don’t Surf
So let’s say this is a war, and let’s say Osama bin Laden is the enemy. What does that mean? If we’re going to go to war, we should know our enemy. Lack of intelligence has been cited again and again as a precursor to last week’s tragedy.
Osama bin Laden was born in Yemen and raised in Saudi Arabia. He was a Saudi citizen until 1994. The bin Laden family became wealthy in the construction business and Osama is said to have inherited $300 million when his father died in 1988. In the 1980s, Osama bin Laden joined the Afghan mujahedin in what was considered a holy war to push the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. By some accounts, bin Laden was a soldier, by others a fundraiser for the Afghan forces. The Saudi and American governments provided most of the funding for the mujahedin. Bin Laden had some contact with the CIA at that time and may have received CIA training.
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