The 19-man army

What I can’t get over is how Osama bin Laden managed to damage my country so badly with an army of 19 men.

I guess we would have to concede him his victory in New York. That defeat was an awful price to pay for ignoring all the intelligence that pointed to an attack.

After that, though, it wasn’t any time at all before we completely acknowledged his unique (in our battle history) skill and determination as an enemy. We know his tactics and understand his strategy. Why, then, five years later, are we still letting him bleed us?

All terrorists are media experts. They know how to manipulate reaction. They know how to get into the news, get onto television, and stay there. Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building at 9 o’clock on the morning of a sunny day. Bin Laden’s pathetic soldiers flew the airplanes into the towers at 9 on the morning of a sunny day. They did that for an excellent reason. They wanted to give the cameras maximum time to see. The plot just discovered in Britain all involved blowing up planes coming from Europe to the United States. Those are daylight flights. Going the other direction, they all take off in the late afternoon or evening.

Reaction is bin Laden’s sword. At first it was a tiny sword, no bigger than 19 boxcutters being snuck through security. Today the sword is huge, for one simple, maddening reason, one reaction that bin Laden was counting on: we are helping him swing it, with our Iraq war, and Patriot Acts, and surveillance schemes, and end runs on the Constitution, and dissolution of values and principles into so-called correct ideology.

So much damage, that sword has wrought in five years. And now it is so late, and we are bleeding from so many cuts. There must be someone in my country’s leadership who has the skill, intelligence and determination to take the sword out of bin Laden’s hands. But I can’t think of a name. All the famous names, in the national leadership, and I can’t think of one who would know exactly what to do, and how to do it, at this point. It certainly hasn’t been George Bush. He may be the Decider, but what we need desperately is a Uniter.

We need someone to remind us who we are. The Bush administration keeps telling us we’re safer than we were five years ago. I don’t feel safer. There’s this huge sword swinging around. Our leadership, with all its display, is acting just like the terrorist wants us to act, then suggests we are dead wrong if we disagree. It makes all of us out to be acting just like the terrorist wants us to act. But we’re not that way. I watched the buildings burning on Sept. 11, and at some point got on email and messaged everybody I knew that we should think what the terrorists would want us to do, and then do the opposite thing. Nobody objected, or disagreed. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know how to fight a terrorist. We just all need to be brought together in this quiet, firm, fight, and quickly.

Trying to watch football

It’s going to be a long football season. I watched part of the Florida State-Miami game on Monday night and was overwhelmed by the production, which shrank the game itself to a relatively calm eye at the center of a hurricane of visuals and sound.

All television sports is being shrunk in this way, by hurricane production values aimed at a target audience of young men and boys who like bells and whistles more than they like blocking and tackling. The commercial breaks are long and frequent, and the commercials are compressed action movies. Everywhere there are tents and bright lights shining down on sideline sets with former coaches and jocks yelling analysis at each other, and into the living room. Somewhere behind all that are the players, trying to keep warm, even in September, for that moment when play is allowed to resume.

I wish football on television was like dinner at a good restaurant used to be, when the food was great and the waiter was invisible, until two seconds before you needed him, and there he was. Today, everyone who watches sports on television eats at Ruby Tuesday’s (where, true to the form, they brag about making hamburgers out of steaks), or does takeout. ESPN has a morning sports talk show called “Cold Pizza,” which nails the demographic exactly.

The better the game, the worse the hurricane. This weekend it’s No. 1 Ohio State at No. 2 Texas. It is a game that should not be scheduled before the first week of October. It is being played the second weekend in September for only two reasons. One, the hurricane has become monstrously hungry over the last few years, with its power to suck millions of young male eyeballs into primo (god, we even start to talk like them) position to view commercials for steak hamburgers and cheap, shiny cars in which to go for six-packs and tomorrow morning’s cold pizza. That is a hunger that needs to be fed by a big game every week. Two, the hurricane is greedy for perfect conditions. If Ohio State and Texas were allowed to go four games into the season, against teams other than Northern Illinois and North Texas, one of them might lose, and they would no longer be No. 1 and No. 2. They might also be undefeated, and much better, more interesting teams with four games under their belts, but that is not a risk worth taking.

Somewhere in there is a game many of us remember, and still want to watch. The rules have been changed a little, to shorten the game. This year, the clock will start at the instant of kickoff, not when the returner catches the ball, and after first downs, the clock starts when the referee spots the football, not when the ball is snapped. Essentially, the new rules take time away from the game to compensate for the extra time the production hurricane is taking for commercials and halftimes. There are, again, only two reasons for that. One, advertisers and television schedulers want their games in three-hour packets, so when games are stacked consecutively, they can stay on schedule. Two, when games start running long, viewers go to sleep, or pass out, which kills the hurricane pretty quickly.

These are all excellent business reasons, when football on television is the business and revenue is the bottom line. Are they professional? Personally, I don’t think so, but I can’t back that up with anything more than an observation. During the Florida State-Miami hurricane, suddenly there were a succession of football coaches – all the head coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference, it turned out – making simple statements, as if to their teams in the locker room, about fair play and sportsmanship. They didn’t look or sound believable. They didn’t even look like they belonged.