Friday, September 14, 2001 (9:41pm) Shithead alert: Here's one of those very smart people who seem to think that nothing is too monstrous to be owed America and who actually believe that there is anywhere in the world freer than the United States, including Canada - which I love mind you, but freer it's not by a long shot - and (doesn't this have to be a joke?) Germany, where one has to have a license to golf yet where a man who beat up a policeman in the '60s while cheerfully singing the "Internationale" gets to be Foreign Minister. Anarchists, of the cyberpunk variety or otherwise, are just another kind of totalitarian - eliminate authority, but put everyone in some sort of supposedly more democratic collective where everything is everyone's business. What's the point of abolishing government if you're less free than before? It's amazing how many people don't even know what freedom actually means; I guess Friedrich Hayek was right. God help us all.   Wednesday, September 12, 2001 (4:02pm) I'm supposed to be at Canadian Tire now but I was stood up, so you get a journal entry in the newly available time slot. My roommates were supposed to meet me in the McGill métro at 2:45 but were both very late. Since I was expecting them to arrive separately, I assumed that I had the wrong coordinates and left. I'm not really mad, though after the succession of weirdos that came up to me with increasingly disturbing requests in multiple languages (ever spend a half hour sitting on a subway platform before?), I'm in a rather bad mood, which I guess is ideal for writing about what I'm about to write about. I was going to post something yesterday, even before the attack happened, but I sort of got sidetracked by talking to other people in the real world and online, trying to ascertain in the early confusion whether everybody I know was OK or not. So far the prognosis is good, though my good friend Sue, who goes to Pace University a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center used to be, has gone totally AWOL, at least from my end (I can only assume someone out there knows whether she's dead or alive). What with the condition of the telecommunication networks in New York, I'm not really too nervous about her conspicuous silence, but it's still a worry. At any rate, one of my emails has ended up being posted online, by the incomparable Virginia Postrel, whose web coverage of the disaster has been absolutely extraordinary. I wasn't being brilliant by any means, but it's probably about what I would have written here last night. Click here and scroll down to "View from Montreal." At any rate, I went to all my classes today so I now have an even better feel for how it's like to be out of your country at its darkest hour in recent memory. Really rather disturbing it must be said, though I'm sure it's easier on me than my friend Jessica who is actually from New York. There were a lot of people on campus today discussing the attack, of course, but I sort of gathered from the tenor of their conversation that I really didn't want to listen to what they had to say. What little taste I had for sniveling, pretentious pseudo-intellectual leftist babble, of the type that I seem to be forever subjected to around here (as at any university I guess) has been totally eviscerated. I've already heard a bit of morally equivalent posturing - my communist friend suggested that the CIA did it to build support for missile defense - and as sickened and shocked as I am by everything, I suspect I'd have not reacted quite rationally; in fact I'd go so far to say that if I had encountered anyone seriously making a defense of the bombers - and no doubt they are out there, though probably in more conspicuous quantity here than in any U.S. schools - I very likely would have had to make them bleed right then and there (I was wearing my steel-toed teeth-kicking shoes today; amazing how even libertarians can get brown-shirt streaks under the right circumstances). Western Anti-Americanism always fascinates me (more than angering me; certainly people can think what they want and I'm not about to say that my country is perfect), not just in the way that it manages to absolutely blind people, but also because its adherents always seem to think they are making some sort of original stand or fight against the Man or fringe statement, or that they are just smarter than everyone else, when in fact it's just about the most hackneyed political view imaginable. For God's sake, everyone hates America, including a lot of Americans. (To be really avant-garde, try defending the U.S. in a room full of ungrateful left-wingers!) So now we - and by we, I of course mean they - need to decide what happens next. I have concluded that what I suspected all along, but had wanted to deny, having a bit of the idealistic university student in me too, namely that the Middle East peace process is a complete waste of everyone's time, is the reality we must now operate from. It seems abundantly clear to me from the reading of history that no peace has ever resulted between a free and unfree people (or really between anybody else for that matter) through talking and negotiating, and that the most peaceful - if not always free and productive - times in history are generally those when one group enforces its will on everybody else around. That's not necessarily a happy truth, and one which 48 hours ago I would have been shocked to hear myself express, but I think we have to start operating from that assumption. It's time to begin deciding who are friends are - and after yesterday, I should think that there ought to be little dispute about which side in the Middle East actually does have the moral high ground - and who our enemies are, and act accordingly to decisively back the former and send the latter back to the stone age, possibly to be rebuilt as a civilized culture along the lines of Germany or Japan. This does not mean, as one of my dad's coworkers put it, turning everything between Jerusalem and the Khyber Pass into a sheet of glass, but it is going to require a significant amount of bloodshed, which I think we should take no pleasure from. At the very least, the hairbrained Carter-era nonsense prohibiting government assassinations - which allows us to, for example, kiil everyone in Baghdad except Saddam Hussein - should be immediatly repealed. I'd say our first target needs to be Afghanistan, where we've tolerated the vicious Taliban for far too long; after we can move our energies onwards to the other hideous despotisms we've coddled for too long. And to the extent that this was an attack on liberal Western Civilization itself, not just on the United States per se, all the western world should participate in punishing the terrorists and those who give them comfort (perhaps pursuing some common program would help our chilly relations with Russia as well, not that it worked especially well in World War II). Unfortunately, it's going to be a very interesting few years to be alive now. Evan P.S. For an idea of the potentially ugly domestic reaction against good American Muslims which we should strive to avoid, I would recommend watching The Siege, a little-remembered Denzel Washington vehicle which seemed outlandish at the time, but suddenly rather docile; for a more intellectual look at how the same American instincts are likely to come to bear in the coming weeks and months, read this article by W.R. Mead. P.P.S. I guess I had better get used to being searched at the border all the time from now on, eh?

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