Spiritual suckitude

Mark Morford has a nice rant on O'Reilly in the SF Chronicle:

In a way, we should be grateful for O'Reilly and Robertson and Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and their slime-slinging ilk. They live in those black and nasty psycho-emotional places, so we don't have to. They show us how ugly we can be, how poisonous and ill, so we may recoil and say, "Whoa, you know what? I think I need to be more gentle and less judgmental and kinder to those I love." O'Reilly has an inverse effect on anyone with a vibrant and active soul -- he makes us better by sucking all the grossness into himself and blowing it out via a TV channel that no one of any spiritual acumen really respects anyway.

It's a very San Francisco kind of rant. Anyone who can turn Fox news into a tool for enlightenment ought to set up shop as a guru or something.

Four years after

Four years after 9/11. I don't have much to say, but the NYT has a good article by Mark Danner, Taking Stock of the Forever War

Quote:

"We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer."

And it's a good opportunity to point to the almost creepily apposite Auden poem that everybody knows by now. As they say, read the whole thing, but these lines resonate to the point of shaking the building apart.

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief :
We must suffer them all again.

...

All I have is a voice
To undo the unfolded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky :
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone ;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police ;
We must love one another or die.