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| Monday, September 17, 2001 |
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Rift zones 
| | When I was fresh out of college and trying to head a young family while fighting the draft and making a living, I lived on the third floor of an anonymous apartment complex in Hackensack New Jersey. Across the hall were Hans and Illy Schmidt, a pair of highly cultured Austrian Jews whose experiences in World War II were never subject to discussion, but which informed their generally Liberal politics in an obviously deep way. Hans especially shared my dislike of the Vietnam war, although he always counseled against blanket opposition. Better to talk than simply to accuse. I'm sure my later thinking about conversation was to some degree informed by my conversations with Hans. |
| | Yet none of those conversations stays with me more than our very last one, which happened when I ran into him about a year after I moved about thirty miles away to Greenwood Lake. I felt bad about not having stayed in touch, even though my our lives had become arduous and many other friends were also being neglected. |
| | "Yes," Hans said after hearing all my excuses. "It's so hard to make friends, isn't it? And so easy to lose them." With that he climbed in his car and I never saw him again. |
| | I see two ways we'll start losing friends over the next few weeks and months. |
| | One is over the matter of racial and religious profiling, both in our hearts and in security screenings at airports and elsewhere. The fact that apparently all the perpetrators of last week's atrocities were Arabic Muslims will be too hard for many of us to ignore. |
| | The other is over the matter of patriotism. Most of us support the President's committment to this new war, whatever it might turn out to be. A minority of us are opposed to it, or at least trying to talk across differences of opinion. |
| | In both cases, there is an Us vs. Them mentality at work. We should be careful about it. Especially once the war starts and the dead start coming home. |
| | There is still an US here. It's a rare and beautiful thing, however tragic the reasons. Let's try to stay together. |
| | I'd like to say more about this, but Jeffrey is on the swing and wants to be pushed. And I hardly have the time to keep talking anyway. |
But he's still full-bore wacko
| | Rev. Falwell has apologized for saying Americans he doesn't like brought down God's wrath on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. |
The answer is 9-11.
| | Any "day that will live in infamy" needs a name. Or at least a nickname. And of tomorrow "last Tuesday's events" won't do. So, what is it? |
| | Lately I've been hearing "Nine Eleven." At least 'Eleven" has some significance: |
| | - The World Trade Center towers formed an 11.
- September 11 is the 254th day of the year. 2+5+4=11.
- There are 111 remaining days in the year after September 11
- There are 11 letters in New York City. Also in The Pentagon.
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| | The list goes on. I heard some of it this morning while I was trying to get a portable radio to pull in the Howard Stern Show. Howard's signals from Los Angeles and San Diego are weak and spotty at best in Santa Barbara, where I also in a really bad hole. Plus the atmospherics this morning were especially bad. All I caught was the above, which was delivered by a show regular named Casey (KC? I dunno.). At one point somebody suggested that 11 was Casey's IQ. Then Howard, which a wicked knack for exposing the idiocy of others, asked Casey "How many sides does the Pentagon have?" The guy didn't know. I offer this to counter whatever veracity the list above might suggest for itself. |
Perspective
| | Great piece about the influence of Arabic culture on the west, with examples. of Arabic words. |
| | Being the good hacker that I am, I have to add another one: algorithm. |
| | There's not a working computer programmer in the world who doesn't trade every day in the conceptual materials that the Arab world gave us. |
| | I have a couple of favorite artistic moments of Muslim appreciation that I like to share whenever the issue arises: |
| | First, although in general it was a terrible movie, rent "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" starring Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman. Watch it for the respectful relationship that the characters have with and for each other. But the specific moment I love is when Freeman's character fashions a makeshift telescope, the better to see the advancing Sheriff of Nottingham's men with. When Costner's character asks to look through it, and does, he nearly falls off of the wall they're sitting on. I appreciate this little bit of culturo-historical accuracy (while Europe was locked in the Dark Ages, the Muslim community was busily writing treatise after treatise on mathematics and, in particular, on optics). |
| | Closely related is, of course, the piece of fiction that, despite being fictional, contains my greatest Christian hero, greater even than the saint I was named after. I'm referring, of course, to Brother William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's magnificent "The Name of the Rose." Brother William also remarks at a key point in the novel about the knowledge to be found among the "infidels," and generally takes an extremely even-handed and level-headed perspective on what the relationship between faith and science is as well as the relationship between cultures of differing faiths. It's a poignant reminder that faith and science have not always historically been at loggerheads, and that it's possible to maintain one's faith and one's respect for the accomplishments of others at the same time. |
| | The piece Paul compliments is A Modest Proposal. It received other positive email as well. |
What for
| | On reading this one is impressed with how incredibly cruel and hopelessly insensitive this man is, particularly to the families of those who died, who suffer unimaginable grief at the loss they have endured. Nearly 10,000 have perished at this writing, and their families are now asked to believe by this so-called religious leader that the terror and the agonizing death by fire, and falling, and crushing, and suffocation were caused by a God who is supposedly teaching us a lesson. What an appalling thought. What unredeemable cruelty. But we got what we deserved. |
| | The opposite is the case. We are not punished for our sins. We have been assaulted for our virtues, among them: our freedom to make choices, our freedom to grow beyond the bounds of our nurture, our freedom to express ourselves without retribution, our freedom to assess the fanaticwhether home-grown or foreign inspired as the enemy of that freedom, our freedom to live in a vital, vibrant national community where our differences are celebrated, our freedom to grow in wealth and opportunity, our freedom to use what ever instrument it takes to care for those in need, our freedom to exercise the compassionate heart not only for our own and world brother and sisterhood of mankind, but of all beings, the being of the planet itself. Yes. Our freedom to be pagan if we so choose. In short our freedom, the very foundation of our democracy. |
| | Good stuff, but also I have the same problems with this as I did with President Bush when he called Tuesday's events "attacks on Freedom" — and with George Gilder when he wrote this... |
| | What the enemies of Israel‹and America‹really hate and fear is human creativity. Flourishing only under capitalism, creativity is our key endowment, in the image of our creator. Without the miracle of mind, expressed in the art and enterprise of a free society, human beings become mere meat. |
| | Even if everything they say is true, focusing on it also does two things: 1) it risks ignoring the humanity of less developed people; and 2) it pointedly ignores the deepest issue, which Gary Kamiya nails down in The bloody Jordan river now flows through America, in Salon. His case is summarized in one line: this we know: as long as millions of Islamic and Arab people hate America because of its Mideast policies, we will be in danger. |
| | Kamiya goes on to recommend specific remedies. The fact that he even tries makes it worth reading. |
United we relate
| | "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," the cliché goes. "Tragedy purges the mind of trivia," George Gilder adds. |
| | Lately I've been hearing and reading fears about great companies falling into bankruptcy. For reasons given in the first paragraph, I don't think so. |
| | I'm a highly frequent flyer on United Airlines, which has jokingly been called "U.S. Aeroflot" for its highly institutional nature. Now Untied.com, which mocked United's often clueless customer service (with plenty of cause) has taken its entire contents off-line, "out of respect for the victims, their family and friends of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S." |
| | That's nice, but I think it goes deeper than that. United Airlines is not, and cannot, be the same airline it was. Nor can American Airlines. The two largest and most industrial airlines in the world were used by terrorists in part because of those airlines' natures as massively routinized carriers of human cargo. |
| | Within the space of a few minutes on Tuesday, both companies were profoundly humanized, along with their entire industry. They became one with their workers, their customers, their country and their real market, which is the human space where people do business with each other. |
| | I'll probably fly United on Wednesday. I look forward to it, but not just for the experience of getting my work life back to normal. I have a relationship with United, and it goes deeper than the privileges they've granted me for being a good customer. I'm not sure how much deeper, but I am sure about why. |
| | In The Cluetrain Manifesto we introduced a new meme into the world: markets are conversations. What I've learned since then, mostly from new friends more familiar than I am with traditional markets — friends mostly in the Third World — is that markets are relationships. |
| | In a conversation about this a few weeks ago with Eric S. Raymond, he suggested a three-layer model of a market. At the bottom is exchange. Above that is conversation. And at the top is relationship. This clarifies what my Third World friends have also been telling me about the misunderstood nature of all markets — not just traditional ones. |
| | Here in the First World we have always understood business, and markets, in terms of exchange. And yes, we have also understood them in terms of conversation and relationship; but we would also invert their importance, placing exchange on top. Often we would sacrafice conversation and relationship by making decisions based entirely on "the bottom line." |
| | What terrorists did on Tuesday was attack the heart of the world's industries of exchange. The unintended effect, however, was to create more conversation and deeper relationships — for even the largest and least personal corporations. |
| | I heard somewhere that Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that lost more than seven hundred people from its offices at the top of Tower #1 of the World Trade Center, has been inundated by new customers eager to do business with the firm. |
| | I also heard that the likelihood of lawsuits coming out of the World Trade Center destruction — an act of satan probably not covered by any insurance policy — was relatively small, and certainly in bad form. What makes them bad form is the improving relationships they would violate. |
| | And thus we are starting to remember what we have too long forgotten: that business is among the most human of activities. And what makes businesses most human are the relationships they invite and sustain. |
Buy now and save
| | Michael Grove sent me this email yesterday. With his permission I'm passing it along: |
| | Patriotic talk is one thing. Actions are another. The terrorists think we are weak and as we grow in fear we will become weaker. We have an opportunity to express our will and convictions on Monday morning when the stock market opens. If we fear from a recession, from an unclear "war", from uncertainty, some and likely many of us will "sell" on Monday morning and the terrorists will be winning as selling will bring more fear and doom. The world will doubt us and trust us less. |
| | I am buying on Monday! I am taking action. I believe in the future of America and I want us to be strong in the face of terrorists. If enough of us take action on Monday we can send a message loudly to the world - "We believe in America and our future". Monday is a vote of confidence. It is a vote of National interests over personal fears. If we succeed we will produce another victory over terrorism. Imagine the improved morale of our leaders,the Nation, and our global friends will be when the market end an up day! This is a statement only we can make massively as individuals. |
| | If you mean what you say about standing behind our Nation, put your money on the line and bet on the American Economy, bet on your belief in a stronger America and bet against terrorism. Your actions do count. Please joined me. |
| | Regards, Michael I. Grove |
Understandably
| | It seems David didn't make it out of the Tower. |
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