THE GOOD WORD
“If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.”

— Charles Marsh, “God and Country,” The Boston Globe, July 8, 2007

Marsh prefaces his article by quoting a line from the old Dylan song: “If God is on our side, He’ll stop the next war…” Studs Terkel interviewed Dylan (Zimmerman) in 1963. He was asked about another song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and in response he explained that he wasn’t “talking about that hard rain meaning atomic rain,” but instead that “it seems to me like the bomb is a god in some sort of way,… and people will worship it actually. You have to be nice to it, you know. You have to be careful what you say about it. People work on it, they go six days a week and work on it, you have people designing it, you know, it’s a whole new show. … I don’t believe they’re bad people.

“…What’s gonna happen, there’s got to be an explosion of some kind. The hard rain that’s gonna fall. In the last verse when I say, ‘When the pellets of poison are flooding the waters,’ that means all the lies, you know, all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers. All you have to do is think for a minute. They’re trying to take people’s brains away. Which maybe has been done already. I have to think it’s been done. All the lies I consider poison.” (Quoted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott [New York: Wenner, 2006], pp. 7, 8)

Poisonous pieties and self-righteous platitudes, to boot.

Sir, I beg your pardon,” said the sandy-haired young man. “There is nothing here. You don’t seem to understand. The Middle East, all of this, this is nothing.” He gestured around the new living room and toward the window, where we could see a half-finished house, obscured in the fading winter light by a haze of blowing sand.

“The Middle East,” he said, firmly taking another crescent, “is just a corridor, a pass-through for great powers. Always has been. Throughout history. Even more now.”

“But the Golden Age,” I protested. “The Arabian Nights.”

“That was centuries ago.” The young man laughed disdainfully. “Do you see any magnificent palaces in Baghdad today?” …

Mr. Kirtikar set down his biscuit-filled plate. “Ah, Sami,” he said to the sandy-haired young man. “You’re not being fair to our guests. We are all here, my dear Sami, most probably, is that you do not see a long-range future for yourself here in Baghdad.”

“Why?” asked Bob. “Is it politics? Religious discrimination against Christians? East-West tensions? The Arab-Israeli conflict?” Bob came out with it. The company looked slightly embarrassed. Mrs. Kirtikar offered more tea. There were more cardamom crescents and also large round thick cookies with whole almonds pressed into their centers.

Sami nodded. He had apparently decided to take this strange American seriously. “All of those things,” he replied. “Yes. I would like to go to America. Maybe you could give me a list of places where there are scholarships available? Because,” he rushed on, “well, in addition to all of those things you mentioned you must remember that this is a poor area, a poor country. Without resources such as you are accustomed to taking for granted.” He laughed, bitterly, I thought. “Nomads. The desert. Living off of goats’ milk. You have surely heard of all that, even in rich America.”

“But what about oil?” Bob asked. “You have plenty of that.”

Mr. Kirtikar sniffed. “The British take most of it. Iraq gets only a small share. But you see the British made a great investment and they are the ones who brought the technology that made it possible for Iraq to exploit their oil. So they deserve the largest share.”

Was he serious? I stared at him. He was, and he was not finished talking. “And the Arab-Israeli conflict, that is not such a problem. It will pass with time.”

— Elizabeth and Robert Fernea, The Arab World: Personal Encounters, ch. 14, “Baghdad and Al-Nahra, Iraq” (1956) [New York: Anchor Books, 1985], pp. 334, 335

An Onion editorial cartoon (29 October 2007).

As the popular saying goes, “In times of universal deceit, truth-telling becomes a revolutionary act.”* Indeed, I discovered a bit of this myself when for this week’s issue of my campus paper, The Wooster Voice, in an editorial I made the following off-hand observations: (1) the president — our president and leader of the free world — likely has several of the defining characteristics of sociopathy, (2) has presided over a murderous and criminal reign, (3) impeachment is a moderate, in fact conservative and, most importantly, the right constitutional remedy, and (4) given the above facts it is shocking enough that the firing squad (or gallows) option goes unmentioned.

I wrote this in full recognition that many will take these statements to be extreme, even awful and deplorable. So I will be completely clear in what I am saying; a fault of the article, in retrospect a glaring one, is its lack of clarity which may make people jump to the wrong conclusions. First, another colorless and uncontroversial fact: our leaders have committed, repeatedly and remorselessly, crimes against peace and war crimes (though not crimes against humanity, in my opinion, although others may disagree) for which the defendants at Nuremberg were hanged — including waterboarding, a political science professor and study advisor at my college, was quick to add. Expecting an outcome, based upon the logic of crime and punishment, is not the same as desiring it. The aggressive war against Iraq hatched in Washington is obviously far from the scale of Nazi criminality — not suggesting that. But let’s have some honesty and consistency in our moral judgments. Otherwise, ethical standards have no meaning and ought to be discarded.

Here I am going to quote from the record of the Trial of the Century. As Norman Birkett, alternate judge for the United Kingdom, declared on September 30, 1946: “To initiate a war of aggression, … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (proceedings of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, vol. 22, p. 426, via the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School). Or as United States prosecutor Robert Jackson said on November 21, 1945, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well” (quoted in “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,” Office of the United States Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946], vol. 1, ch. 5, “Opening Statement for the United States,” via Avalon Project).

Anyway, earlier today I watched Robert Redford’s excellent and stunning film Lions for Lambs. “Rome is burning.” Reminded me of a song that went, “How do we sleep when our beds are burning?” Or “Room on Fire,” by The Strokes, in which Julian Casablancas wails, “The room is on fire/and she’s fixing her hair!” But I digress.

*Of course, this is attributed to Orwell, although it is not precisely sourced and actually comes up in many different variations.

NOTE (Nov. 11): Common-sensical commentator Frank Rich hit the nail on the head today.

“So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. ... Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad. ... In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

“This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

“... Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

“Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that ‘there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.’

“To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.”

As Garret Keizer wrote in a recent issue of Harper’s magazine: “It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation’s health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn’t working—and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.”

CYNICAL THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If Musharraf had our electoral system, he wouldn’t have to worry about an independent judiciary — or mass, popular demonstrations in city streets. (Ouch.)

I’ve got only enough time these days for short posts, like the preceding one (and a random though hilarious photo to boot). As a matter of fact, I used to have a series of “rumble jumbles,” but those have fallen by the wayside. That and my computer (a 2005 iMac from the PowerPC era) has been acting screwy; almost makes me miss my old Dell laptop. Maybe needs more memory. Should be studying for that Hebrew midterm tomorrow, but first…

We’re now right in the middle of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Stone a pundit! Declare a fatwa on your university, O Westerners! See, David Horowitz is a funny man. Not comedically; I mean there is something that is quite clearly imbalanced about him. I’ve read his autobiography (in 2006), and have read his writings as much as I can keep up, trying to keep appraised of where he’s at intellectually. And to be honest? Lunacy, sheer lunacy. The picture of his mind that he presents in that autobio is completely opposed to the character he parades as on TV and in his speeches, and diatribe-based performances. It’s day and night: one is a reasonable man trying to overcome and repudiate and have second thoughts from the shady notions he used to have, and the other is an unthinking, hysterical party-liner who sees criticism as an act of treason.

That said I agreed with every point on the Islamo-Fascism petition, which stated thoughtfully enough the following: “[W]e affirm four key principles denied by the jihadists and threatened by them: the right of all people to live in freedom and dignity; the freedom of the individual conscience: to change religions or have no religion at all; the equality of [sic] dignity of women and men; the right of all people to live free from violence, intimidation, and coercion… opposing all forms of religious supremacism, violence and intimidation.” Perfectly fine. No quarrel. And for the most part, I think “Islamofascism” is a valid and non-hateful term. I wouldn’t hestitate to designate hateful and intolerant species of Christianity as Christofascism and the same in Judaism (I believe Meir Kahane’s movement came closest to this) as Judeofascism.* Nor should Horowitz, and if he were consistent I don’t expect he would. An important caveat is that Islamist extremism is much more prevalent and, crucially, more violent: let us not forget that we are in deed at war with the Islamofascists. The Christofascists and Judeofascists have not yet embraced suicide terror, nor do they seek the destruction of Western civilization; conversely, the Christofascists seek the end of the American Enlightenment and constitutionalism and the Judeofascists seek the prevention of a viable, sensible Palestinian state. Alright, enough with this piece.

The Pew Research Center reported last Thursday that the news media, once again, is totally at odds with people’s “news interest.” It’s almost inverted. Twenty percent of Americans “listed” the “situation in Iraq… as their most closely followed story” and the media responded by giving it six percent of the coverage. Only eight percent are most closely keeping tabs on the 2008 presidential (ugh) campaign; fifteen percent of coverage is devoted to it, which admittedly is not quite as dramatic as the Iraq Slaughterhouse (er, war).

Jeff Bercovici’s Mixed Media blog at Portfolio raises an interesting question: if Fox has an alternative to CNBC (and the self-described “unabashed capitalists” who run it, quoted in the New York Times) with its Fox Business Network, who’s the enemy? The “news” division’s “bread and butter is the culture war, and it’s forever inventing new campaigns to boil viewers’ blood in the dead space between celebrity scandals.” Generally, the forgotten man versus a shadowy big government that overtaxes him and is prone to take away his land (the eminent domain demon). What’s the equivalent? “Where’s the us-versus-them?” Would it be “the forgotten little guy against the sinister corporate interests”? Likely not, since Bercovici quotes Fox president Roger Ailes as saying that he simply doesn’t see them “as the enemy.” Wouldn’t be politically correct.

“Alternatively,” Bercovici adds, “Fox Business could adopt a libertarian stance: embattled entrepreneurs versus heavy-handed, tax-and-regulate government.” Seems like it would jibe very well; in the news, the little guy gets fucked over by dastardly bureaucrats who think they’re doing it for the common good, and in business hard-working Joes trying to set up shop keep getting hassled. Their entire enterprise would be admirable if it weren’t soaked with nationalist ideology and tabloid-chic sensibilities, upon which blowhard “experts” and “analysts” get to pounce, snipe and self-aggrandize.

*In an article for Slate (Oct. 22), Christopher Hitchens goes farther, pointing out that Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers [Gush Enumim, Bloc of the Faithful] who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967.” Hitchens adds that “there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being ‘singled out’ on this point.”

Strange days have found us: first there was that Israeli neo-Nazi cell (you read that correctly), and now this? Oh, and once again the Indians got massacred. Strange days indeed.

First time seeing this in any major U.S. paper. Yeah, it’s definitely a first (not counting the N-bomb in Slate some time ago):

“Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those ‘good Germans’ who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.”

— Frank Rich, 14 October 2007

Radiohead’s latest work, In Rainbows, their last since 2003’s Hail to the Thief (my pithy comments last time), is a Web-only deal at any price you choose. I decided to pay a fair share, considering my respect for their sound and the hypnotizing effect their music has always had on me: $8.50, which is what the baseline music album price probably ought to be I think. In only ten much-too-short tracks it’s clear it’s going to take time to grow on you like the others have; toward the middle it becomes almost symphonic, beautifully. Then it cuts off. Next year’s full-release should promise more, but with what exists now quality, at the outset, seems to have triumphed over its ne’er-do-well sibling quantity.

The royal treatment.

I’m with Hitchens on this one: enabling of genocide in Darfur, tyranny in Burma — not to mention the antifreeze and lead. Enough is enough. BOYCOTT THE 2008 BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES

“We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate. … 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again. … We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy.”

— Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 30 September 2007 (his emphasis)

At least he acknowledges his own contribution to the off-balance discourse. Here’s where he’d been all this time:

“… let’s stay the course in Iraq, but stay extra-vigilant at home” (13 April 2005)

“Sept. 11 amounts to World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years” (8 January 2004)

“The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.’s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it’s the wrong issue now. … The ‘real reason’ for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough. Because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. … The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world” (4 June 2003)

“Lord knows, 9/11 has been a trauma for us, and our response has been to strike back and install better security” (8 January 2003)

“Thank you, may the Imam Mahdi’s return be hastened, for your silver grail. And here is your gold star…”

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veritable dean of realist international relations figures, has just said that “the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.” This comes about one week after French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said that the world should “prepare” for a US-Iran war should negotiations fail. Redux indeed.

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit.
Blood on the trees, blood at the root.
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck.
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

— “Strange Fruit” (1939), courtesy Michael Louis-Ingram

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” (Alan Greenspan, in his memoir The Age of Turbulence, as quoted by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, 15 September)

You meant what you said, Alan. Grow a pair and quit dissembling.

(Courtesy Martin Klimas, and a personal hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan, who drew my attention to this really cool gallery; I think this is the best one.)

An air-attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would likely lead to a Shiite uprising in the South of Iraq — that’s why the Brits are trying to get out of there as quickly as possible — and mass casualties across the country. It would align the new Shiite ‘government’ in Baghdad much more closely with Iran, and force the US into a hideous alliance with Sunni dictators and Sunni tribes. We would have no other global allies. We would still have insufficient troops to win. And we would not just have created a regional civil war in the Middle East; we would have taken sides in it. Such a development could unleash a wave of Islamist terror across the West far more lethal than anything we have yet seen — and even bring the Sunni-Shiite conflict to the streets of Western cities. Such warfare would likely lead to an intensification of the imperial presidency at home, with all the consequences for the Constitution that would entail. There is a disconnect right now, I fear, between the enormous stakes we are deciding and the awareness of most Americans of what may be about to engulf them.”

— Andrew Sullivan, 12 September 2007

Writing in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn is skeptical: “Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I’ve had my doubts. … China has a big stake in Iran. It’s also Uncle Sam’s banker. The Chinese don’t have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices at Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn’t want that.

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff know the Iraq War has almost broken the US Army,” he adds; it is worth noting that it has been reported that several military commanders have vowed to resign should war with Iran commence. “Wouldn’t they adamantly oppose the notion of an attack on Iran, which would see Shiite resistance groups in Iraq cut US supply convoys from Kuwait…? [Sullivan’s point, I believe] Wouldn’t Shiite forces as a whole finally commence a campaign of eviction of the American occupier?” These are reasonable critiques, although I disagree that “the Israel lobby calls the shots in US foreign policy,” as Cockburn believes. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

NOTE (Sept. 15): Debat vigorously denied the allegations brought against him yesterday, and the examination has been extended to his reporting of the Jundullah affair in Pakistan, the reported US arming of the militant organization in an effort to spur regime change in Iran. The New York Times reports that ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross, “the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources. ‘We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,’ he said. … So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network ‘at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.’”

CORRECTION: One of the more sensational claims in the preceding post was attributed to one Alexis Debat of the Nixon Center who, according to the New York Times, “has been revealed to be the author of faked interviews” and ABC News is launching what is going to be “a second investigation” into Debat, on whom ABC had used as “a consultant.” This obviously brings into question the credibility of his claims about our war plans for Iran. The Times notes that Debat “was quoted as a knowledgeable source in an article in The Times of London … saying that American military forces were planning attacks that would demolish ‘the entire Iranian military.’” Regardless, I think, of the validity of the source saying this, that would be the way to do it. It doesn’t make much sense to take out the nuclear plants and wait for a response, which would of course be balls-out ballistic. So, in a word, mea culpa.

“Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout [for war against Iran] will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way [my italics]:

They [the source’s institution] have ‘instructions’ (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this — they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hesitated before posting this. I don’t want to spread alarmist rumors.”

— Barnett Rubin, a specialist on Afghanistan at New York University (according to George Packer of the New Yorker), 29 August 2007

What about the alarmism — and dehumanization — in that cartoon (above) in the Columbus Dispatch, published on 4 September, the day after Labor Day?

In related news: “The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to ... well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.”

(The report adds that “Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a ‘full-spectrum approach,’ designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of ‘a weak or failed state.’ Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration’s National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power.”)

Oh, and the London Times reported on 2 September that “the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to ... Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, [who] said last week that US military planners were not preparing for ‘pinprick strikes’ against Iran’s nuclear facilities ... at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: ‘Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.’ It was, he added, a ‘very legitimate strategic calculus’.”

Stop the cockroaches before it is too late!

ADDENDUM (Sept. 11): I’m not alone in my crazed assertions. One commentator at Asia Times (some kook named Alan Jamieson) also thinks war against Iran looms, writing specifically that it’s most likely to go down sometime over the next twelve months, possibly just as the 2008 election heats up. Speaking of today, though, it’s not one for politics — albeit that politics but for a brief lull swept it into an exploited memory that less and less of my generation remembers, judging by an increasingly younger freshman class that was all of twelve(!) when it happened. My God. To paraphrase Hot Tuna, death don’t have no mercy in this world.