Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Wednesday, 12 September 2018 12:42
Rosenblum writes: "Lots of young people sparkle with brilliance, self-assured and curious about a world they'll have to un-fuckup. They are, however, the exception."
A classroom. (photo: Nicholas Fevelo/NY Daily News)
Not Tocqueville After All These Years
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
12 September 18
ALABASH, North Carolina – It was no surprise that a roomful of adults turned to a 9-year-old to demystify the computerized kitchen range at our rented beach house near here. But it was flat-out eerie that she also could have corrected our Chinese grammar had we known any to correct.
At our first meeting, she froze me rigid with a patronizing sneer; I got her name wrong. Later, she warmed up with a friendly kid smile when I disgraced myself playing cacophonic harmonica backup to my nephew Jon’s guitar mastery. After that, we were buddies.
Little S., in a fancy school for smart kids, fits a pattern I’ve noticed in trying to make sense of the generational shifts I see in serial snapshots, like time-frame photography, when I come from abroad to teach journalism students and to probe into a foreign society I once knew well.
Lots of young people sparkle with brilliance, self-assured and curious about a world they’ll have to un-fuckup. They are, however, the exception. The United States has come a long way from its raw-boned frontier days when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his hoary tome, Democracy in America.
In 1835, the iconic French sociologist noted “a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”
Today, he would find many of those weak wanting to suppress the weaker, believing that raises their own level. And that reduces them to preferring inequality in servitude to a wealthy few, which squanders their freedoms and imperils democratic institutions.
In Calabash, an old-timey hardscrabble shrimp port, not all necks are red, but the politics are. Tom Frank’s incisive book, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, resonates as loudly here as it does in impoverished Midwest states, the rural West, and urban pockets across the country.
Go figure. Guys apt to fire shotguns at cars that cut them off in traffic defend the right of banks and businesses to screw them at every turn. They’d rather die of treatable disease than let “socialism” taint their lives with universal health care, common to just about every democracy in the world.
The problem is education, and that is no accident. During the Reagan years, schools headed in two separate directions. Social-engineering plutocrats wanted smart young people who believe money is how you keep score – and a lot more credulous hewers and haulers who buy stuff.
Today, rather than trying to restore the balance, we have billionaire Betsy DeVos pushing to privatize the fast track, leaving public schools at the mercy of state legislatures that starve teachers, favor religious doctrine over science, ignore the outside world, and program kids not to question.
If you ask hardcore zealots why they like Trump, jaws tighten and brows furrow. The answer, if you get one, is that he says what he thinks and makes the world respect us. Or, he’s a successful businessman who will make us better off. These rock-solid beliefs impel them to the polls.
At the other extreme, on a stop in New York, I doubt anyone at the noisy table near me at The Ribbon on the Upper Westside likes Trump. But I’m guessing. The three young couples’ raucous banter was limited to their high-paying techie jobs, their newest toys, and who lusted after whom.
I knew they traveled because of the European restaurants they mispronounced. Yet none of these would-be masters of the universe seemed aware that countries they visit face existential crises because of quixotic policy from America’s Crazytown. People like them are less likely to vote.
It’s a tossup. Trump might be the shock treatment America needed. In November, sentient citizens might begin choosing leaders who understand nature – and human nature. You can’t drain swamps, which are a vital part of ecological balance, but you can prevent reptiles from taking them over.
The overriding question is whether the right-wing “libertarian” plan to make America ignorant has already achieved its goal. We’ll have an answer in November’s referendumb.
Assuming all is not lost – it likely isn’t – it seems past time to consider the après-Trump. As I bat this out, I keep hearing those Crosby, Stills and Nash lyrics from 1970: “Teach your children well.” That line resonated loudly with me back then after three years of reporting mayhem across Africa.
Notable differences aside, we might learn from so many post-colonial African states that started out with such promise: functioning democracies, balanced books, populations inured to hard work, and a history of old civilizations like Great Zimbabwe, the Kongo kingdoms, and the Mali Empire.
I repeatedly asked U.S. diplomats why education was missing from foreign aid. That, they invariably replied, was too long-term. America wanted to rent friends with big flashy “development” projects that entrenched corruption but bought U.N. votes to thwart the Soviet Union.
The result was inevitable. Dictators diverted billions to European properties and foreign bank accounts. They educated military officers and a political elite to suppress populations that were taught just enough to keep societies functioning as, to use Trump’s term, shitholes.
The Congo, at independence in 1960, had six university graduates. Belgian colonial schools had taught a lot about Belgium and simple skills to equip low-level civil servants. Imagine how many brilliant minds were wasted in a vast nation of incalculable mineral wealth and rich farmland.
Closer to the point, look at Finland today. Its middling schools became the world’s best when all education was made public. Rich and poor kids alike learn to think, to ask questions, to use their imaginations, and to understand global realities beyond their own line of sight. America, in contrast, ranks 51st worldwide in literacy.
The United States, far more complex than Finland, needs fast tracks for prodigies like 9-year-old S. But it also needs a higher common denominator for public schools, with motivated teachers and world maps on the wall, where kids learn that skin tone and bank balances are not what count.
In much of the world, universities are free – or close to it. In America, combined student debt is around $1.5 trillion. Corporations have just given back about that same amount to investors in stock buybacks and dividends.
A little intellectual curiosity and analysis blows all to hell a demagogue’s empty braggadocio. Macro numbers mislead. As Paul Krugman notes, if Jeff Bezos walks into a bar, the average income of the joint shoots up by several billion dollars. But you’ve still got to pay for your own beer.
One in three Americans have $5,000 or less socked away for retirement. The Waltons (a different breed from the TV family that scraped by in a little house on the prairie) just pocketed another $11 billion. Or was it $15 billion? They got rich from hard-pressed families struggling to make ends meet.
To improve education, American needs a president, a Congress, state legislators, and local school supervisors who get their priorities straight. The problem isn’t cost. For starters, we might stop blowing up schools in Afghanistan and build more classrooms around Calabash.
(For a look at how American teachers fare these days, here is a sampling.)
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
FOCUS: Top 3 Charges on Which John Bolton Should Be Tried at International Criminal Court
Wednesday, 12 September 2018 11:32
Cole writes: "National Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration - perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump's sniffle."
John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Top 3 Charges on Which John Bolton Should Be Tried at International Criminal Court
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
12 September 18
ational Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration– perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump’s sniffle. This week he threatened justices of the International Criminal Court in the Hague with physical abduction were they to dare indict an American for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.
The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute, which went into effect in 2002 has been ratified by 123 nations of the world. Most of Europe and all of Latin America and half of African states have signed. Virtually the only deadbeats are countries whose officials are afraid of being indicted by the court for serious human rights crimes, such as Syria, China, India, Sudan, Israel, Russia and . . . the United States of America (actually the latter four signed but they pulled out when they realized that they had exposed their state officials to prosecution, what with the war crimes they are constantly committing).
The ICC undertook to try dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but he was killed before he could be brought before it; it still has an outstanding case against the dictator’s son Seif. For Bolton to menace it in this way makes clear that he is in the Gaddafi category, which is why he fears the institution.
Bolton has no particular expertise in anything at all, he is just an angry shyster lawyer picked up by the more insane elements of the Republican Party as their pit bull. He once denied that the United Nations exists, then tried to make him US ambassador to the United Nations (he wasn’t confirmed, but served briefly on a sneaky Bush recess appointment).
So here are five crimes that I allege Bolton has committed, for which he by all rights should face justice at the Hague, at the hands of the same ICC judges that he just brutishly threatened:
1. Bolton played a key role in hoodwinking the American public into the 2003 US war of aggression on Iraq, for which there was no legitimate casus belli or legal basis for war. The UN Charter forbids the initiation of a war except where a country is attacked and responds in self-defense or where the UN Security Council designates a government as a threat to world order (as it did Gaddafi’s Libya). These attempts to outlaw wars of aggression were a reaction against the Nazi invasion of Poland, etc. People like Bolton, who don’t want any constraints on his power from the international rule of law, are just trying out for the role of people like Nazi generals Günther von Kluge and Gerd von Rundstedt, who led the assault on Poland. (Like Bolton in regard to Iraq, they maintained that they were only defending themselves from a menacing Poland, but nobody believed this lie).
Bolton is manifestly guilty of the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute and its 2010 enabling statutes adopted at Kampala: Article 8 bis, para 1, says: For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
As Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security under Bush, Bolton was clearly a high executive officer of a government guilty of the crime of aggression.
2. As National Security Adviser, Bolton has supported the Apartheid policies of the far-right extremist government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu toward the Occupied Palestinians.
Apartheid is a crime under the Rome Statute:
‘The crime of apartheid’ means inhumane acts . . . committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
He also supports the transfer of Israeli citizens into the Occupied West Bank as squatters on Palestinian land.
8.2.b.viii stipulates as a war crime
“The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.”
Bolton strongly supports and enables a whole range of war crimes of the Likud regime in Tel Aviv against the Palestinian people, above all keeping them in a condition of abject statelessness and continually stealing their property.
Under war crimes comes “Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”
It could be argued that Israel could not engage in these illegal violations of Palestinian rights save for the American veto, so that high US officials who conspire to enable crimes like Apartheid and usurpation of Occupied Territories are even more guilty than Israeli officials.
3. Bolton is in the back pocket of, has spoken for, and may have received significant monies from the People’s Jihadis (Mojahedin-e Khalq), a group that has been on the US State Department terrorist watch list and which has killed civilians with bombings and attacks in Iran. They even had a base given them for these purposes by Saddam Hussein, in whose company Bolton has fallen, given their alliance with this same Iranian cult.
The MEK is guilty of “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” and under this heading, of murder. In fact, it has killed Americans. Bolton gets red in the face about threats to the US except that he pals around with people who have the blood of Americans on their hands.
How delightful it would be to see Bolton at the Hague, before the very judges he threatened to kidnap.
Milbank writes: "Trump has, by now, declared that virtually all those who have criticized him are guilty of the capital crime of treason. The group has just been expanded to include not just all Democrats, all journalists and several Republicans, but also some members of his own administration."
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Treason? Why Not!
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
12 September 18
’ll write the real book!” says President Trump, vowing to counter the “scam” Bob Woodward has just published.
This is no idle threat. By the time his presidency is over, he may be the only one left to write a book. The rest of us will have gone to the gallows.
Trump has, by now, declared that virtually all those who have criticized him are guilty of the capital crime of treason. The group has just been expanded to include not just all Democrats, all journalists and several Republicans, but also some members of his own administration.
“This is treason,” Trump informed his then-economic adviser, Gary Cohn, when Cohn attempted to resign after Trump’s nice words for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, according to Woodward’s book.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, likewise, was pronounced a “traitor” by Trump for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.
Two Benedict Arnolds in one young administration? Make that three. “TREASON?” Trump asked via Twitter after an unnamed administration official criticized him in a New York Times op-ed last week. “Is it subversion? Is it treason?” he asked the next day. He answered his own question on Fox News: “Virtually, you know, it’s treason.” Trump regarded a personal embarrassment as a national security threat.
Woodward has left us with so many troubling images of Trump — incompetence, erratic behavior, ignoring advice — that it is a close competition to determine the most worrisome. I nominate Trump’s Louis XIV-style belief that he is the state, that his self-interest and the national interest are the same.
News he doesn’t like is “fake.”
Actions he doesn’t like are “illegal.”
People he doesn’t like are “traitors.”
Trump says the famed journalist and author should be disbelieved because “I don’t talk the way I am quoted.” But Woodward’s Trump sounds exactly like the Trump we hear daily.
During a Sept. 3 interview with the Daily Caller, Trump suggested that the so-called surveillance of his campaign was “treasonous.” On June 23, he told Mike Huckabee that coverage of his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was “almost treasonous.” On Feb. 5, after congressional Democrats’ failed to applaud for him at the State of the Union, he said: “Can we call that treason? Why not?”
On Jan. 11, he told the Wall Street Journal that FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text messages to his mistress were “a treasonous act.” He has also embraced the view that Hillary Clinton, leakers and Republicans who didn’t support him in the 2016 election were traitors.
If criticism is a capital offense, we must consider the awkward possibility that several current and former Trump administration officials are on the hangman’s dance card. In Woodward’s account, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,” Cohn described him as a “professional liar,” then-lawyer John Dowd told the president that he was “not really capable” of answering a prosecutor’s questions, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly called him an “idiot.”
Advisers, worried about “his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn,” treat him like a man-child, distracting him from the geopolitical equivalent of sticking his finger in an electrical socket.
Trump knows the consequences of calling somebody a traitor. “You know what treason is?” Trump once declared. “That’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving the atomic bomb, okay?” (Actually, that was espionage.)
Therefore, in hopes he will commute my sentence, I submit the following draft for the jacket copy of Trump’s forthcoming version of his presidency, “The Real Book”:
Before Donald Trump became president, there was 42 percent unemployment, most of the residents of Chicago had been murdered, the violent gang MS-13, led by Nancy Pelosi, controlled much of the country, President Barack Obama personally tapped Trump’s phones and Ted Cruz’s father assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Then, in November 2016, Trump won a bigger electoral landslide than Ronald Reagan’s, despite millions of fraudulent votes for his opponent. Immediately, American carnage ceased, every African American got a job, the economy became “soooo good, perhaps the best in our country’s history,” and Trump was more popular than Abraham Lincoln.
Despite the fact Trump had Made America Great Again, Democrats, aided by the failing New York Times, the Amazon Washington Post and fake-news CNN, used a phony dossier to start a rigged witch hunt. There was NO COLLUSION, but leaking liar James B. Comey, mentally disabled Jeff Sessions, angry conflicted Democrat Robert S. Mueller III, so-called judges, the corrupt FBI and the “Justice” Department made Joseph McCarthy look like a baby!
Fortunately, Trump summarily declared them all guilty of treason, did the same to the rest of his opponents and then assembled the largest audience ever to witness an execution, period. Now he is president for life and, when he speaks, people sit up at attention.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
Tuesday, 11 September 2018 12:58
Keillor writes: "Back when I did a radio show in Minnesota, I liked to make fun of Lutherans for their lumbering earnestness, their obsessive moderation, their dread of giving offense. I felt obliged to make fun of them because they were the heart of my audience, but now that I'm old and out of the way, I feel obliged to do penance."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: NPR)
Old Man Spends Sunday Among Lutherans
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
11 September 18
ack when I did a radio show in Minnesota, I liked to make fun of Lutherans for their lumbering earnestness, their obsessive moderation, their dread of giving offense. I felt obliged to make fun of them because they were the heart of my audience, but now that I’m old and out of the way, I feel obliged to do penance, and so last weekend I traveled to Bayfield, Wisconsin, to speak at an old Norwegian church, Bethesda Lutheran, celebrating its 125th anniversary there on the shore of Lake Superior. I was not paid to do this but I was offered coffee and doughnuts.
Bayfield is an old fishing and lumbering town whose main industry now is tourism. The town has tried to kill off tourism by raising the price of rooms to a Manhattan level but people still come from near and far to look at the lake. I myself would rather look at Lutherans, so I did that instead.
Bethesda is a handsome classic wooden church, high-pitched roof and steeple. You’d find it in Grant Wood and in New England landscape paintings. The sanctuary seats about 100 skinny people, or about eighty Lutherans, and it was full for the 8:30 a.m. service. The good people had put my favorite hymns in the service, “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and “Children of the Heavenly Father,” “Nearer, My God, To Thee,” and “Shall We Gather at the River,” and they sang them beautifully, as Lutherans do. Harmony is fundamental to their faith. You may disagree with them on doctrine but if you can sing alto or tenor, you’re okay.
They assigned me to read the Epistle at the service, and I noted that they’d chosen a passage from 1 Peter: “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander,” thereby paying me back for forty years of satire on the radio. I took it to heart, as one should. Envy and insincerity I’m certainly guilty of, malice and slander not so much, and guile — I don’t think so. “Guile” infers craftiness and smarts, and I plead innocent there.
They did give me a chance to speak in my own defense, which was only right, since I’d flown out from New York for the service. I began by correcting them: a pastor had said they were celebrating the 125th anniversary of “Christian worship and witness in Bayfield” and I reminded them that French Catholic missionaries such as Father Jacques Marquette, S.J., had preceded them by 200 years. They took this in good grace.
And then I said what I had come to say, which was that I love them, sincerely. They believe in kindness as a prime virtue and they believe in service to others, doing their part, chipping in, pulling their oar. Bethesda is a small church, only forty-five members, and a lady told me after the service, “We could merge with other churches, but the beauty of a small church is that everyone has to do their part, you can’t leave it to the others.”
They are a warm, accepting people. A note on the bulletin said, “We acknowledge that we worship on the traditional grounds of the Anishinaabe and we honor their elders both past and present.” And the service began with the lighting of sacred tobacco by an Ojibwe elder who played a solo on his wooden flute. He was welcomed and so was I.
I told them they remind me of my aunts who were the important people in my upbringing. I had eighteen of them. We were staunch fundamentalists, not Lutherans, and it was a time when women took a back seat, but my aunts were loving people, merciful, given to kindness, and lovingkindness triumphs over power.
There was coffee and ice cream afterward and extensive commingling, a beautiful Sunday on the shore. I talked with a couple who spend their summers taking wheelchair kids on canoe trips into the Boundary Waters and with a sailor who’d sailed from Bayfield to Norway and said, “When the weather’s rough, you depend on your boat to take care of you,” and I met old people my age who are caring for incapacitated spouses. I was glad I’d made the trip. They feel like family. I could’ve stayed all day but I had a plane to catch. So I stood in their midst and sang, “Wise men say, only fools rush in” and they all joined in and now they know. I can’t help falling in love with Lutherans.
FOCUS: A Nation's Grief Was Hijacked on the Afternoon of September 11, 2001
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Tuesday, 11 September 2018 11:21
Pierce writes: "For all practical purposes, the Iraq War, with all its terrible consequences, intended and unintended, was launched on September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked that morning. A country's grief and pain was hijacked later that day."
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. (photo: Aristide Economopoulos)
A Nation's Grief Was Hijacked on the Afternoon of September 11, 2001
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
11 September 18
Keep the memories of those who exploited the attacks at arm's length.
y first reaction to the news of the atrocities committed on September 11, 2001 was to think about all my good friends who'd regularly made a habit of eating breakfast at Windows On The World, and then praying to God that they'd all eaten at their desks that morning. (Which they had, thank heavens.) In Washington, however, the reaction of Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, was quite different from mine. With lower Manhattan, and the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania all still smoldering, this was Donald Rumsfeld's reaction. From a 2002 CBS News report:
With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H."–meaning Saddam Hussein–"at same time. Not only UBL"–the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.
Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld. "Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Things related.
And not.
While most people were thinking and praying for friends and relatives in New York City, and just generally walking around stunned and hurting, there were people in government already planning to use the attacks as an opportunity to carry out the imperial projects about which they'd been dreaming for decades. (There were other people in government who saw the attacks as a chance to put in place authoritarian measures that had been gathering dust on the shelf since COINTELPRO was exposed in 1971.)
For all practical purposes, the Iraq War, with all its terrible consequences, intended and unintended, was launched on September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked that morning. A country's grief and pain was hijacked later that day.
So, yes, today, remember the fallen, and the friends lost and never found. But remember, too, that many of the people who will be telling you today how much "changed" that day were responsible for some of the changes that never should have happened—Iraq, rendition, torture, warrantless surveillance. Remember the fallen but remember the opportunists, too, the people who were neither stunned nor hurting enough that they lost sight of their golden dreams and who, when those dreams came apart in dust and blood, were able largely to escape responsibility and consequence.
Many of them are Never Trumpers now. Many of them will share their memories of that awful day in which so many of them found a dark opportunity to take the country into the shadows from which it has yet to emerge. Keep all those people and their memories at arm's length. Treasure your own. Console yourself with them if you must. But keep away from the anesthetic banalities that were used to shield effectively the plans and connivances of the people who saw opportunity in the still-burning places that morning. Remember things related.
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ALABASH, North Carolina – It was no surprise that a roomful of adults turned to a 9-year-old to demystify the computerized kitchen range at our rented beach house near here. But it was flat-out eerie that she also could have corrected our Chinese grammar had we known any to correct.
ational Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration– perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump’s sniffle. This week he threatened justices of the International Criminal Court in the Hague with physical abduction were they to dare indict an American for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.
’ll write 
ack when I did a radio show in Minnesota, I liked to make fun of Lutherans for their lumbering earnestness, their obsessive moderation, their dread of giving offense. I felt obliged to make fun of them because they were the heart of my audience, but now that I’m old and out of the way, I feel obliged to do penance, and so last weekend I traveled to Bayfield, Wisconsin, to speak at an old Norwegian church, Bethesda Lutheran, celebrating its 125th anniversary there on the shore of Lake Superior. I was not paid to do this but I was offered coffee and doughnuts.
y first reaction to the news of the atrocities committed on September 11, 2001 was to think about all my good friends who'd regularly made a habit of eating breakfast at Windows On The World, and then praying to God that they'd all eaten at their desks that morning. (Which they had, thank heavens.) In Washington, however, the reaction of Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, was quite different from mine. With lower Manhattan, and the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania all still smoldering, 
