Every American has memories of that day that will never leave them

The WaPo Saturday

on security contractors/mercenaries in Iraq is a must-read.

From the Sunday Times:

The world testicle cooking championships have fallen victim to a hoax. Kangaroo testicles were specially imported for an contestant who phoned the organiser claiming to be Australia’s top testicle chef, but he never showed up for the competition in Serbia. “We were disappointed when no Australians arrived,” says organiser Gornji Milanovac. “We even had a band ready to welcome them”. Co-organiser Ljubomir Erovic said: “We would like to compare the testicles of a kangaroo to those of wild boars and bulls.”

Another September 11 is upon us, a sort of anti-July 4th in which we celebrate our collective victimhood. It’s a sullen, unlovely form of nationalism. Bush said in his Saturday radio address, speaking of 9/11/01, “Every American has memories of that day that will never leave them.” Yeah, I remember watching it on CNN on a tv screen from 3,000 miles away. Really, I no more have “memories” of the attacks than I do of Luke destroying the Death Star (one good thing you can say about Vader’s management style: Michael Brown wouldn’t have lasted very long. “But Lord Vader, I sent you a report, ‘Skywalker determined to attack inside the Death Staaaarrrrgh.’”). Let’s not pretend it was something every American went through; most of us were just spectators.

Bush continued, “And in the days and weeks that followed, America answered history’s call to bring justice to our enemies and to ensure the survival and success of liberty. And that mission continues today.” In other words, still haven’t caught that bin Laden fella.

“Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life.” FEMA? Michael Brown? You? “This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind.” Notice how he anthropomorphizes nature, attributing “fury” to it for rhetorical balance to “malice”? You know in private he refers to Hurricane Katrina as an “evildoer.” The man is a Manichean down to his toes, just could not exist without an enemy to define himself against.

The underlying message, of course, is “You guys liked me after the last disaster, really rallied around and stopped criticizing me all the time, why can’t it be like that again?” But like Fat Elvis doing a medley of his hits when he was Thin Elvis, it’s not really working anymore.

Not with the general public anyway. Joe Lieberman will still roll over for his tummy to be rubbed, and a Fourth Circuit panel just ruled that Bush can detain any American citizen “enemy combatant.” The opinion said that Jose Padilla was “associated with Al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war.” How many problematic words can you find in that sentence? “Entity” is the lynchpin from which the problematicity of the other words derives, because by refusing to define what exactly Al Qaeda is (the word entity means, literally, something which exists; where words like navy or school or legislature or wife-swapping club give you some idea what those organizations do, the word entity only tells you that it exists), it’s hard to say what being at war with it means or what constitutes being “associated” with it. The Bush admin uses these calculated ambiguities to insist on being allowed the maximum discretion to define who the “enemy combatants” are and what it can do with them, and the court has given it exactly that.

And no, problematicity isn’t a real word, but you all knew what I meant.