THIS MODERN WORLD

Digby:

I just heard Tucker Carlson casually say that he told his “lesbian leftist friend” (probably Rachel Maddow), “when al Qaeda takes over you’ll be the first one hung up by your thumbs.”

I would really love to hear by what scenario these piddling chickenhawks see al Qaeda “taking over” the United States of America. Super secret laser beams from Mars? How?

What children these people are.

Auctions end Friday. I’m not planning on making any other originals available for the foreseeable future, so the two that are up now are probably your last chance for a long while. Links in the announcements space above.

There are a lot of reasons why Keith Olbermann’s speech last night was a masterpiece, but my favorite bit is the way he references the best television show ever :

And long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm.

Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on.

As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced.

An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help.

The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen, manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men.

“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”

Rod Serling’s genius was that he found a way to work around the censorship that threatened to neuter his “legitimate” writing. In the process, he created a show that was both socially relevant and artistically brilliant. From the Wikipedia’s entry on The Twilight Zone :

Throughout the 1950s, Rod Serling had established himself as one of the hottest names in television, equally famous for his success in writing televised drama as he was for criticizing the medium’s limitations. His most vocal complaints concerned the censorship frequently practiced by sponsors and networks. “I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem,” he said of his 1957 production “The Arena”, intended to be an involving look into contemporary politics. “To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited… In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. That would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.”

And because of this, Serling wrote episodes that make observations about the world that still hold up today. Like The Obsolete Man :

Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.

And The Shelter

For civilization to survive, man must remain civilized.

We could really use another Rod Serling today.

At least I assume that’s what it was, when Alberto Gonzales told Sean Hannity last week that the President is committed to bringing “the masterminds of the 9/11 Commission” to justice.

But hey, who knows?

Hannity: Why would we use the Geneva Conventions as our standard, number one, and why would we confer rights to enemy combatants, considering we’ve never done that before?

Gonzales: Well, we’re not saying the Geneva Convention provides the standards here. But the president never intended that we would detain people indefinitely if we didn’t have to. The president fundamentally believes that in certain cases it is best to bring people to justice, particularly those involved, the masterminds of the 9/11 Commission, if we can bring them to justice, we ought to try to do so, he believes that would bring some level of closure to some of the families of the victims …

Listen for yourself.

(Just to be clear: no fakery here. This is an actual, unaltered clip from the Sean Hannity radio broadcast of Sept. 7, 2006.)

I was sure I had something worth saying about yesterday. But every time I tried I became so sad and angry I couldn’t get anywhere.

So today I’m going to use a gambit I call “looking on the bright side,” and make a list of all the positive things I can remember about fall, 2001.

• By noon on September 11, there was a line a block long outside the hospital near my apartment of people wanting to give blood. Eventually most hospitals in Manhattan started turning everyone away because they had all the blood they could conceivably need. (And this was at a time when they believed they’d have thousands of people wounded, rather than the handful there turned out to be.)

• By 3 p.m. I had email from two friends who’d begun organizing groups of New York non-Muslims to reach out to frightened local Muslims. This turned out to be less necessary than they anticipated, because New Yorkers generally were at the highest level of behavior I’ve ever witnessed in human beings. Still, there were lots of Muslim women who wore hijabs and were scared to go out unaccompanied, and it was useful to find people who could escort them to the grocery store, etc.

I’ve never loved a place more than I loved New York that month. There were lots of people in the rest of the U.S. baying for blood, but I never heard that expressed by a single New Yorker.

• For several days it felt like we must never laugh again. Fortunately that soon dissipated. The first joke I made was when I told Chadd Gindin that the World Trade Center should be rebuilt to look like a giant hand giving Osama bin Laden the finger. This clearly was on the minds of lots of people, as within a week someone had photoshopped this:

• On September 13th, Jerry Falwell learnedly explained:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”

I’m not kidding when I say I seriously considered driving to Lynchburg, Virginia and smashing Falwell in the face with a crowbar. Thankfully Mike Gerber and I were able to transmute any anger into one of my favorite pieces we’ve ever written, “What Falwell Really Meant”. It also got the most galvanic audience reaction we’ve ever received.

• Soon afterward Rob Weisberg came up with the idea of a pamphlet from the New York City tourism board, directed to terrorists, describing the many appealing vulnerabilities of America’s other cities. Mike and I wrote this and sent it to friends, who were so horrified it’s never seen the light of day. Still, I’ve rarely laughed harder than when we were working on it.

• Several months later, there were actual ads encouraging tourists to come back, starring various New York celebrities.

This allowed me to, for the only time in my life, feel affection for Henry Kissinger. I believe the Buddha would have approved.