Turks in the Attic

1. Turks massing on the northern Iraq border. Cross-border raids in progress? According to the Bush Doctrine, the world is to be run like the Wild West, so who can protest? It's tricky, since the Kurds are backed by the USA and the Turks are part of NATO, but what can you do? If there are flowers in the attic, see how they bloom.

2. I remember radio nuts screaming for blood after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: "Arabs were seen fleeing the area . . ." and: "Whatever country is responsible for harboring these terrorists must be carpet bombed back into the Stone Age. If innocents are killed, so be it: let God sort them out." The USA had apparently "harbored" Timothy McVeigh and his gnarly crew. "We begin bombing in five minutes."

3. Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter," Esquire (September 1935):

War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. . . . .

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. . . . .

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Birthdays: Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Pierre Corneille, Nathan Hale, John Trumbull, Alexander Pushkin (Julian calendar), Alexandra Fyodorovna, Thomas Mann, V.C. Andrews (Cleo Virginia Andrews), Chen Chi Chen (aka Cheer Chen), Carl Barât.

Release the hounds!