House of Eratosthenes

I have made repeated reference in this blog, which nobody reads anyway, to my theory that if the human brain is indeed like one of nature’s most perfect computers, then there are two themes of discourse that act like powerful electromagnets and get all that information-processing all bollywonkers and screwed-up in a great big hurry. Those two themes of discourse have to do with girls and young ladies in skimpy outfits, and terrorist attacks, specifically the attacks of 9/11.

There is a tendency, when an even fairly intelligent and reasonable commentator offers his or her views on these two subjects, to emit a powerful and perpetual stream of pure doots.

Today’s example of lunacy about ladies in skimpy outfits, well, I’ll get to that in another post. In here, it would be off-topic. I want to concentrate on the terrorist attacks. What is a terrorist attack anyway? How do we stop one? When one succeeds, whose fault is it?

Well, in the matter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a jury in the Supreme Court of New York has shown they have 32% of a brain amongst the twelve of them. Yeah, 32% of one. I say that because they have conferred responsibility for the attack, upon the terrorists who did it, and — of course! — the Port Authority, 32 to 68.

The bombing of the World Trade Center, on Feb. 26, 1993, was the most destructive terrorist attack on U.S. soil up until that time. Planted in a rental van, a 1,500-pound, urea-nitrate bomb exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center complex, creating a crater 200 feet across and seven stories deep.

The blast killed six people, injured nearly 1,000, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and business interruptions. It could have been worse. “If the van had been parked a few feet closer to one of the pillars,” writes James Bovard, a policy analyst for The Future of Freedom Foundation, “it could have collapsed an entire tower of the Trade Center, killing tens of thousands.”

In fact, the terrorists’ plan was designed to topple New York City’s tallest tower onto its twin, creating maximum havoc during a busy workday with perhaps as many as 50,000 people being killed and a cloud of cyanide gas chasing the survivors through the streets of Manhattan.

Now, after a dozen years of legal maneuvering, a jury in the state Supreme Court of New York has taken the terrorists off the hook for the majority of the blame in their 1993 attack. On Oct. 26, unanimously, the jury said the guys who carried out the bombing were only 32 percent responsible for the damages.

The majority wrongdoer, 68 percent at fault for the death and destruction, said the jury, was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the then-owner of the World Trade Center�which means that the party with the deepest pockets is getting the bill, which means that the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey will be picking up the tab for most of the losses.

I suppose there could be a pragmatic side to all this, since if you declared the terrorists 100% responsible perhaps there would be some effort to collect damages from the terrorists, for the benefit of those who were injured, an effort which would be doomed from the start. But you know, that’s no excuse. This is a cultural problem we have with the concept of a terrorist attack; we seem to think nobody actually did it.

When, the very nature of the word “attack” says that somebody deliberately acted. Someone rented a truck, or hijacked a plane, or set a fuse, or maneuvered into a building…planned the whole thing, supplied it, monitored what was going on to make sure the plan wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late.

Every terrorist attack I’ve ever heard of, in my time, has been a deliberate thing. You might say an exceptionally deliberate thing.

Why does this notion bother me? Well for one thing, the idea that a terrorist attack is just a “thing” that happens from time to time, like a hurricane, tends to delegitimize any preventative measure. How do you handle a tsunami? Or just an ordinary flood? You wait for it to happen, and then you hand out the blankets and the hot food, and start finding places for people to live. And, of course, you resign yourself to the notion that it will happen again and again.

I don’t think that’s our destiny with terrorist attacks.

Yesterday, I saw a fly in my living room. First one of the year. I couldn’t kill the sonofabitch because he was too fast. I expect the stupid six-legged bitch was pregnant, and tonight or tomorrow night I’ll have four flies. You know what, make it a hundred. If I have a hundred flies in my living room, or just one, my vision remains the same: A living room with zero flies in it. That’s my goal. I’m going to kill flies until there are no more flies.

That, right there, captures the essence of what our goal should be with terrorist attacks.

Because let’s face it. There’s only one reason to regard a terrorist attack as a “nuisance,” or treat it like some bizarre weather pattern that’s gonna happen anyway. And that one reason is, you fully expect that you, and everyone you know, will make it to a natural demise without actually being caught in one. It is surreal denial of the possibility that there is any actual danger involved, danger that might possibly touch you someday.

Thing I Know #16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.

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Thirty-Two PercentTuesday, May 16th, 2006

Thirty-Two Percent
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006