October 2003
I stopped writing, but nothing else stopped. The days kept getting longer, then shorter, then longer again. The bombs fell, then stopped, then fell again.
Sunbeams
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Language Of Mass Deception
Noam Chomsky On How The Government Controls Public Opinion
We’re invading Iraq. It’s as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history. . . . It’s the same war crime for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg: the act of aggression. There’s a pretense of self-defense . . . but it’s no more convincing than Hitler’s.
The Pleasure Was All Mine
“Leroy’s going to stay here for a little while,” Jerry announced to my husband Ralph and me one day. Leroy stood behind him looking skinny and frail, dressed in a frayed nylon sweat suit and carrying a paper sack of belongings.
End Times
I am headed toward Florida as my country heads toward war with Iraq. Protests rage around the world, but I do not join the protesters with their “No blood for oil” signs. Every year I’ve been alive, there has been war somewhere. At the beginning of 2003 there were thirty wars being fought around the world.
Parting Questions
When I told my sister, my mother, and my friends that the voice was real, they said I was wrong; it wasn’t possible. Their disbelief was hard for me to take. It scared me. I stopped talking to them.
America! Look At Your Shame!
Around me, I realized, the bus was thicker and thicker with people, some standing, some packed on the seats, all swaying, pleasant and patient-seeming in the green-and-gold light which filled the bus. Across the aisle were some sailors, sitting, their faces very young and very red, in their very white uniforms.
The Designated Marksman
A second is how much time it takes a .50 caliber bullet to travel six hundred meters, and what a lot of people don’t know is that there is a momentary ghost image as the bullet disrupts the air in the focal plane above the target. It’s just science, but I could see it through the scope, and it looks like a soul, a soul that departs the body before the bullet strikes.
