Gary Monro’s blog

Paul Beston The American Spectator comments on President Bush’s declaration that September 11 be known as ‘Patriot’s Day’ in honour of the sacrifices of firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers on that fateful day.

He suggests the attack in 2001 is analogous to the attack on Pearly Harbour in 1941 in that it was only the second time Americans had been attacked on their own soil - and both times they were unprepared. In 1941 however the US concentrated their efforts less on grieving and more on the business of avenging their dead.

Last Sunday, families gathered at Ground Zero to read the names of the dead, and emotions ran high as always. I wonder for how much longer we will encourage survivors to come back to the scene of their greatest torment and re-enact their grief in such a public way. Such rituals can only serve to keep old wounds forever fresh, and they provide an annual reminder for our enemies of the devastating effectiveness of their deeds.

Even while the wounds of Pearl Harbor were fresh, Franklin Roosevelt recognized that a great nation shouldn’t grovel so much in the mire of one of its darkest days, especially when it had a war to win. It is not true that repressing the pain of loss means forgetting it. That is one of our touchy-feely myths. Repression is a key to survival, and Americans once knew this intuitively.

Better that we privately ackowledge our feelings than turn them into an annual ‘Diana moment’. Nothing degrades real grief more than others - politicians, primarily - free-riding on its back in order to demonstrate some superior qualities of their own.

Busy at work but I… gotta… post….

I’ll let Fox do the work.

By the way, do any fellow Brits here watch Fox on cable? Their way of doing news is very, very different from ours. Their conservative slant is obvious - and refreshing. Their approach to interviewing grates though; abrasive, a little rude - interruptions when someone is actually answering the question - and a contrived sense of urgency. Like sobriety just isn’t sexy enough (they obviously never had Sophie Raworth as a presenter)

If we could get the BBC’s presentation style and Fox’s content then maybe we (where ‘we’ = conservatives) would have the broadcaster from heaven?

I mentioned the other day that pulling out of Iraq early could present problems, what with the Iraqi soldiers taking over not being anywhere near good enough to replace coalition troops. President Bush - one of my regular readers - has taken note:

“It’s going to mean a disaster for the whole region,” said Tanya Gilly, director of democracy programs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “If we leave Iraq now before its security forces are strong enough to fight the insurgents and the terrorists, we are creating a new breeding ground for terrorists.”

The President regards Iraq as the centre ground in the war on terrorism, where the winner - America or Iraqi insurgents - then becomes the model for the rest of the middle east. He’s also aware that the killing of American soldiers inspires horror - and debate - at home.

“They’ll kill women and children, knowing that the images of their brutality will horrify civilized people. Their goal is to force us to retreat,” Bush said on Wednesday.

Something else I wrote about recently - having just got back from the US - was the giant Wal-Mart. People do protest about the effects a single - but enormous - Wal-Mart can have on their local community. This has really annoyed one American city council who have banned mention of the company’s name…

Tired of hearing residents complain about plans to build a mammoth Wal-Mart in town, the Yelm City Council [in Washington] has banned the word “Wal-Mart” from its meetings. For good measure, it also passed a moratorium on the term “box store.”

This isn’t the council’s only ban:

The City Council refused to hear public comment on a plan being floated to build a NASCAR track in Yelm, even though an application was never submitted. In defending the censorship, the city attorney said council members can decide what they want to hear and what they’re tired of hearing.

Anyway, the good people of Yelm actually get to vote on the issue in the end so the trashing of the American Constitution in the meantime is okay then.

I’ve not blogged on the Cindy Meehan story because, well, who cares? Her son died in Iraq - a truly awful and very sad experience for her. No doubt in my mind that she is very badly hurt - who would blame her?

But she appears to believe she deserves a special audience with the President as a result and he, er, doesn’t. And since she’s already met him once she’s done better than most in that respect. She’s a heroine of the anti-war crowd and, therefore, the bogey-woman of the pro. Both get some mileage out of her campaign. Here’s the basics:

Casey, her son was killed in April and soon after she met with and was quoted to have been happy with the president’s attitude as he offered her condolences. Now, she is making her stay in Crawford a huge vigil to pull the troops out of Iraq. It’s causing her family, including her grandmothers, aunt and godmother, to say she is using her son’s death to fuel her anti-war agenda and gain promotion. Other grieving parents have lined up against her saying it sullying their kids’ service to run down the cause. Either way, the president addressed it head on and seemed, as usual, to legitimately feel the pain of the rattled parent.

Unless her son was conscripted into the army my sympathy is with her loss but not with her demands for what seems very much like a political gesture to damage the President.

Exercise: you’re the new marketing chap/ess for a fast-food ‘restaurant’. You get to choose where to locate it. All else being equal, where’s a pretty good place?

Researchers show that on average fast-food restaurants were located less than 1 mile away from any school in Chicago. They estimate that fast-food restaurants were three to four times more likely to be within less than 1 mile from a school than what would have been expected had the restaurant been distributed throughout the city in a way unrelated to schools.

The findings add weight to the growing argument that the availability of high-calorie, low-nutrition fast foods play a role in the nationwide epidemic of obesity among children

Everything about America is big - so why exclude the people? And before you chortle - we’re catching up…

Finally, the earth spins more quickly at the core than at the crust. Now that does surprise me…

The solid core that measures about 1,500 miles in diameter is spinning about one-quarter to one-half degree faster, per year, than the rest of the world.

The spin of the Earth’s core is an important part of the dynamo that created the planet’s magnetic field, and researcher Xiaodong Song said he believes magnetic interaction is responsible for the different rates of spin.

Apparently the relative rates of spin does alter so sometimes it will be the crust that spins more quickly. In case you were concerned.

Wal-Mart is America’s largest retailer and is really, really very big. Apparently some stores are bigger than small British shopping malls (mega-Wal-Marts are the size of five football pitches. American football or soccer - that’s big).

It also represents a fascinating focal point for discussion about values and standards, freedom of speech and the over-arching of corporations to impose their own will on a country’s culture. It appears that Wal-Mart, a company with family-based values and a conservative outlook, has a prominent affect on all these.

Wal-Mart is known for several practises. Even I have heard accusations that it pays low salaries and provides poor health benefits to its staff. I also am aware that the family heading the company is a committed Christian one. And I am aware also that Wal-Mart makes its own decisions on whether items are family-friendly - and it will not sell those it regards as contrary to its own value system.

Take, for example, Wal-Mart’s refusal to sell Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album in 1996, citing objections to a lyric that criticized Wal-Mart for selling handguns (a practice that the chain has since discontinued), which they felt was “unfair and irresponsible.” Much as Crow probably appreciated the paternalistic advice, as the No. 1 CD retailer in the world (yes, the world) with sales accounting for 10% of total domestic CD sales, a Wal-Mart boycott can result in hundreds of thousands in lost album sales.

Music producers sometimes produce two versions of their albums - the original and the Wal-Mart friendly version - in order to get round the company’s embargo:

(more…)

(And help a charity while you’re at it).

How much would you pay to be immortalised as a zombie in a Stephen King novel or a good guy in a John Grisham thriller?

King and Grisham are among 16 authors selling the right to have a character in a book named for the buyer to raise money for the First Amendment Project, a California-based non-profit group that promotes freedom of information and expression.

Details of the authors’ offers - and, of course, the bidding - takes place on eBay between September 1st and September 25th.

American Muslims, aware that the London bombings were carried out by Britain’s own citizens, are nervous. The solution, according to Salam Al-Marayati writing in The Washington Post, is to avoid the ghettoisation of that community, as has happened with Muslims in Europe.

The writer suggests that ghetto living is more a European phenomena than an American one but nevertheless warns American Muslims away from falling into the same state - and also points out that ghettosation isn’t just a geographical description:

But that doesn’t mean some American Muslims don’t find themselves on the fringes of society. While social forces in Europe may alienate Muslims, it is political forces in the United States that repel many. Although the vast majority of American Muslims do not live in economically depressed physical ghettos, many live in a psychological ghetto caused by the lack of acceptance they feel from their neighbors and colleagues, especially in the post-Sept. 11 era. This psychological ghetto may prove the largest challenge in the war on terrorism.

The writer’s antidote to to Muslim alienation, while not a complete perscription, is based on a shared idea of nationhood - something Americans are very good at but which we British - thanks to the persistent and politically correct undermining of our glorious history - are probably the world’s worst at.

American Muslims can stem the tide of isolation by articulating a message of Islam that is American-based, not Arab- or South Asian-based.

Muslim leaders in the United States, as in Britain, have established a partnership with law enforcement. That partnership needs national attention to illustrate that the walls of pluralism are impenetrable to the ideologies of hate. It is the turn of American Muslims, like other religious minorities in the United States before them, to overcome stigmatization by clearly demonstrating to all that America is home and that no foe, domestic or foreign, will change that.

It’s the first full day of my week’s holiday in Boston and I’m already blogging. Truly, this is an affliction.

Anyway.

Whilst we in the UK try to absorb the idea that some of the people in our country who hate us are finally going to be shown the door, here in the US this is old news. The Americans have been doing the right thing since 9/11. Their primary targets aren’t just those that abuse their hospitality but also those who are simply here illegally.

The US has an estimated 445,000 illegal immigrants with Latin Americans making the larger portion. However, the proportion of Arabs and Muslims being deported is growing. One of the hardest-hit groups are Pakistanis of whom there are half a million in the US - more than 120,00 in New York alone. The government’s 2003 mandate that all males from any one of 24 mostly Muslim countries must contact their local immigration office was the start of a programme of deportations that led to last year’s record 161, 000 deportations of Muslim and non-Muslim illegals nationwide.

Businesses serving immigrant communities are suffering. Brooklyn’s ‘Little Pakistan’ neighbourhood has seen population levels fall 20%. Restaurants have had to close and shops that might be regarded as ’specialist’ by the community at large - Asian grocers, for example - have to diversify to attract the American mainstream market if they are to survive.

Would the British authorities take such a line against illegal immigrants?

They have misled over the figures in the past and to act against illegals now would necessitate them facing up to that fact. With possibly more illegals (570,000) in the UK than there are in the whole of the US the size of the operation alone could dissuade a government whose heart might never really be in it anyway.

So I think we shouldn’t hold our breath…

Parents’ primary reason for sending their offspring to faith schools is because the standard of education there tends to be that much better than that in the mainstream. Now if you are the kind of person who would avoid such schools because they’re religious and you’re not then be glad you’re not educating the sprogs in the US:

THE GOD VS. Darwin debate went to the White House last week when President Bush weighed in, stating in a roundtable interview with reporters that ‘’intelligent design” should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

(Note: in America, a ‘public school’ is actually a government-run school - it’s not private as it would be in the UK).

Now ‘intelligent design’ is this circular argument that, in a nutshell, states: X works well so it must have been manufactured according to some pre-conceived plan. ‘Intelligent design’ takes the beauty and apparent perfection of the natural world as proof of supernatural intent. The reasoning is, ‘It’s awesome, it works and you can’t prove this evolution nonsense therefore there must be a god’.

Whereas, applied to biology, for example, the evolutionary view is that X works so well - or, to be more accurate, it works as well as this (because it could possibly work better) - because this is the version that helps get the organism as far as reproduction. X is ’successful’ therefore and is passed on to future generations.

So why might Bush be in favour of such teaching in taxpayer financed schools?

One such argument is intellectual diversity: Those who believe that only evolution should be taught in science classrooms are supposedly trying to stifle opposing viewpoints. A related claim is that a left-leaning, elitist scientific establishment, backed by aggressively secularist groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, is using taxpayer dollars to promote its own agenda in the classroom and teach children to despise their parents’ religious beliefs.

My concerns about teaching ‘intelligent design’ - the weak version of creationism - is not so much that it’s taught but where it’s taught - in which lesson. If it’s taught in Religious Education classes then fine, that’s an appropriate place to explain a religious description of life. If it’s taught in a science lesson then I object. ‘Intelligent design’ can have no scientific basis because the designer itself is only posited as the ‘well, so it must be god’ response when there’s a gap - real or perceived - in the scientific theory.

Whatever happens, we should not mix rigorous and disciplined scientific exploration with religious opinion. By all means live with both and respect the freedoms of proponents of each to air their views but the two should not be regarded as similar disciplines. They are very different and they achieve their conclusions in totally unrelated ways. ‘Intelligent design’ is not scientific.

American astronauts are undertaking repairs to the Space Shuttle Discovery’s heat resistant tiles.

They need to remove some ‘gap fillers’ that have come loose from their positions between tiles and now protrude somewhat. The danger is that, during re-entry, these protruding items will direct heat disproportionately onto a few tiles and may cause serious danger to the shuttle.

We get used to space travel and, despite occasional disasters, see it pretty much as a workaday thing for NASA. I think now might be a good point to remember that these people, in their daring, their innovation and their courage, epitomise the very best of the human spirit. America should be proud of them.

We wish them the best of luck.

It’s over. No more G.W.O.T. Instead we have the new, improved G.S.A.V.E - which is, of course, the ‘global struggle against violent extremism’.

According to The New York Times:

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

The newer approach, designed, perhaps, to comfort an increasingly sceptical American public, takes on a broader approach, defining extemism specifically as the target:

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that “terror is the method they use.”

“It is more than just a military war on terror,” Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. “It’s broader than that. It’s a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative.”

The idea of rebranding the war had been posited earlier by our very own Boris Johnson in July 14th’s The Spectator (back issues require subscription)

…if we use the vocabulary of war, it gives the maniacs all the more excuse to wage war on us. When Bush said, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us,’ and then invaded Iraq on charges that were frankly trumped-up, he co-opted tens of millions of Muslims into the camp of his enemies, even though they might loathe Saddam. They had nowhere else to go.

To keep talking of war plays on militant Muslim paranoia, and, incidentally, since it is a key point of Islamic theology that the suicide bomber may not be called a martyr, and therefore entitled to his ration of virgins/raisins, unless he dies in ‘war’, we are by our own vocabulary offering these people an incitement to murder and a laissez-passer to paradise.

What brought about this change of heart? The easiest guess is that the Americans realise that they can’t kill terrorists as fast as the madrassas can produce them and so face being in Iraq for a very long - and very expensive - time. Iraq is proving that when one side doesn’t care at all who dies and the other side does care at least a bit the side that doesn’t care has a much better kill-to-killed ratio.

If the future of the middle-east lies in the hands of moderate Muslims those moderates should not feel they are on the receiving end of a war they didn’t start. Good that the Americans are seeing this.