BuzzMachine

Fly Naked redux
– I want the record to show that I came up with the idea of flying naked on Dec. 22 and Dec. 23 — long before Thomas Friedman of the NY Times. Thanks to Will Vehrs and to letter-writer Frank Millheim, Jr. for giving me the credit I so richly deserve. Now if only I can get credit on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal and in Slate‘s new weblog, I’ll know I’ve arrived. Care to nominate me since I’m too humble? Tell them: Opinion Journal.

The germ
Two arguments that the anthrax villian is foreign (which remins m theses until I see evidence to the contrary):

> The Times of London says the literary sleuth who helped unmask both the Unabomber and the temporariliy anonymous author of Primary Colors says we should be looking to Pakistan.

> And the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal says the trail leads to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia.

Change for the sake of change
– Michael Wolff has a half-right column in New York about the changes in American after Sept. 11. He wants to poo-poo this as a big change, a monumental change in life because the war is short and most of America doesn’t (a) live in New York or (b) read newspapers. That’s where he’s wrong. Even granting that my own perspective is skewed as a witness and survivor, I still say that there are inevitable changes in how we live as a society now that we have been attacked on our own soil, now that we find a common cause against terrorism with a sometimes surprising worldwide coalition, now that we are forced out of what had been a growing isolationism, now that we have found unity. Oh, many of the changes that we have seen will be temporary (will New York stay nice?). But many will be long-lasting. We just don’t know which ones those are yet. And Wolff, at the end of his long screed [boy, it takes print people a lot longer than bloggers to say what they think — perhaps because print people are paid by the word and bloggers aren’t paid for anything] finally concludes that we don’t yet know exactly how Sept. 11 changed us. So he’s right there. And he’s right, too, when he points to big changes in media: hard in, soft out. War is Viagra.

Already?
– I know this is stupid but I was surprised to realize, thanks to the White House site, that Bush has been in office (almost) a year already. It seems like almost yesterday when he stole the election. It was only yesterday when we were innocent of war. It seems like forever ago when tech and the economy were riding high.

Meanwhile, back at the front…
– The Times of London reports that the shoe boy, whatever his name turns out to be, “worshipped” in the same mosque with none other than Zacarias Moussaoui, now under indictment in America as the “20th hijacker” who was too stupid to make it on board on Sept. 11. Good enough for me. The Times also quotes the leader of the Brixton mosque as saying that the shoe boy was “incapable of acting alone and was probably on a test mission for a new terrorist technique when he apparently tried to detonate C4 plastic explosive packed into his shoes on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami last Saturday,”

Douse the yule log and get back to war.

Friggin’ Frogs
– Sorry for the francophotic smear but what bozos they are for letting shoe boy on a flight Saturday after rejecting him Friday. The Times reports they even put him up in a four-star hotel.

A Christmas gift
– I came home tonight, at midnight, from my Christmas Eve services — one for the children, who make this all so worthwhile; the other with candlelight, lessons, and carols that I sing gamely but badly. It is Christmas as last.

It hasn’t felt much like Christmas in New York lately; it has been too warm, too sad, and too strange. I was counting on these services to cure that and they started the treatment. Then I came home to do my elfen duties, delighted to stack up my kids’ presents, all the happiness they’ll be unwrapping in the morning. And that continued the treatment. It is Christmas at last.

But it’s still a different Christmas for so many reasons. Among them: This year, my wife and I decided not to exchange gifts and convinced our parents to refrain as well; we just didn’t feel like malling it. So I wasn’t expecting any gifts.

And then I got a quite unexpected gift, a wonderful one from a fellow blogger, Thomas Nephew, the proprietor of Newsrack. I had made reference in the post-cum-sermon below and in an email exchange to a Christmas Eve message from a concentration camp delivered by Martin Niemˆller [via at Die Zeit] that I had been trying to translate (I speak German about as well as I sing in a choir: not well).

And I came home tonight to find Thomas’ complete and eloquent translation of the Niemˆller sermon awaiting me in my email.

I can’t tell you how much this gift meant to me. That he would go to this effort is emblematic of the community of close strangers I’ve found myself in here in Blogdom. Three months ago, I didn’t know Thomas Nephew or Ken Layne or the vacationing Matt Welch or Reid Stott or Charles Johnson or Glenn Reynolds or Will Vehrs or Tim Blair or Oliver Willis or Andrew Hofer or Rossi. And now I count them as colleagues and friends. Now one of them — one of this true community — went out of his way on what is surely a busy Christmas Eve to translate this long sermon for a stranger. Thank you Thomas.

Merry Christmas

And G’bless us, every one.

[Fresher posts below.]

Merry Christmas, world

– So 2,000 years ago, we are led to believe, strife and suffering in the Holy Land led God to send his only son to Earth to wash away our sins and give mankind the hope of a new beginning.

Now, exactly 2,000 years later, at this Christmas, there is still strife and suffering in the Holy Land and it has spread the world around, escalating to nothing less than a World War against terrorism and evil now being fought at our door.

Yes, this is a depressing thought — not exactly the gift you were hoping for this Christmas.

It would seem as if we’ve made no progress in all this time. In fact, it would seem as if we’ve made things even worse. And if we are left still with sin and suffering and without hope, then perhaps God also made a mess of things or did what He did in vain. It can look like that.

But stop there. Now is the time — if there ever were a time — to look at what Christmas actually means. And I come to believe that Christmas is not about the light — the star, the gifts, the warmth, the virtue — but instead about the contrast, about the dark around it. Christmas is about the need for hope among the hopeless, virtue amidst sin, light in the darkness.

I come to think of another Christmas: December 24, 1944, when the Rev. Martin Niemˆller preached in Dachau. I’ve long been fascinated by Niemˆller: A U-boat captain in World War I who supported Hitler, he came to oppose the Nazis when they opposed his church and he spent eight years in concentration camps as Hitler’s personal prisoner. Niemˆller is famous for the often-paraphrased warning: “When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church ó and there was nobody left to be concerned.”

What fascinates me about Niemˆller is that he came to virtue through the back door. He was not on the right side of things in Germany and he confesses that he came to the right side only when the situation affected him, when he became a victim. But then he stepped up and showed great vision, fortitude, and courage. He fought Hitler, for Christ’s sake.

And in 1944, he preached to a tiny congregation of fellow prisoners in Dachau. Die Zeit reprints that sermon this week and I only wish I could reliably translate it. But let the scene speak for itself: Here, facing the worst of despair and despotism was a man who held onto Christmas. He needed to.

The first Christmas was about trying to find hope when it was most needed. That Christmas in a concentration camp was much the same. And now, this Christmas, 2000 years after the first, we face nothing so dark and terrible and yet we despair at the grief of the 3,000 families of Sept. 11; we worry about the evil that fights us, we see darkness. And so we need Christmas.

Whether you believe in Christmas or not is entirely your business and not mine. But regardless, I think we all can see that the events of Sept. 11 have forced us, not unlike Niemˆller, to decide where we stand and what we must do when faced with evil and with choice; it changes us even if it does not seem to change the world around us. I think we all can agree on the need for renewal and rebirth in the world — in the Holy Land, in Afghanistan, in too many places. I think we all can agree on the need for grace and the need to learn how to love our neighbors as ourselves (which sometimes means protecting them against their neighbors). I think we all can agree on the need for an example and for hope.

So Christmas is not lessened this year because it is a bad year. No, precisely because it is a bad year, Christmas is more needed, more meaningful. For Christmas is a time for the future — for our children and for hope.

So merry Christmas, my friends.

-jeff

Sermon over
– For a proper antidote to my sermonizing, see Ken Layne‘s (and Tim Blair’s) holiday songs. And thanks to Ken for the link to the sermon.

Not flying solo
– The BBC says the shoe bomber likely was not acting alone.

The TALLiban
– Alert Kathy Kinsley points out that the shoe bomber and the missing Osama bin Laden are the same height! Maybe Osama did have plastic surgery, she says. Maybe we should just round up all 6’4″ men. That would include Howard Stern. Uh-oh: That would include me. No, I protest! This is spatial profiling!

Calling all big guys
– The best scene-setter I’ve seen yet on what happened on the shoe bomb flight, from the Washington Post.

Are those platform shoes you’re wearing or are you just happy to see me?
– The pictures of people taking off their shoes to put them through the X-ray machine at airports only points to the hopeless absurdity of this. So now they check shoes. But the next nut could hide the C4 in his pocket. Or as an astute reader of Instapundit puts it: “I can only hope that a terrorist never tries to blow up a plane using some C4 hidden up his ass.” I repeat, the only solution is to Fly Naked.

Fly Naked: Part II
– See my rant below on the only sure key to airline safety: We all have to fly naked.

– Ken Layne finds more benefits to my suggestion. First, Muslim fundamentalists won’t be flying around lots of nekked women! Second, the world will go on a diet. People will be thinner. I’ll have more elbow room and fat people won’t be shoving their seat back into my knees. Third, better hygiene: We can hose down smelly people.

– Now you might say to me, Jeff, don’t be ridiculous. At least we can fly in our underwear. But no. If enough C4 to take down a jet could be shoved into a shoe, imagine what could fit into a padded bra. I can see the headline now: Man Arrested at Logan With Explosive Codpiece. Ouch.

– The point, obviously, is that there is no sure cure here. If had not been for one very smart and heroic flight attendant who happened to catch the whiff of one very stupid terrorist’s match, we’d be watching wall-to-wall coverage of another jet crash this morning (still unsure at this hour what brought it down). This was way too close a call. Way too close.

– Note this morning that the would-be bomb sure didn’t look like a regular Brit. To a Frenchman, he might have, but not to any of us. He looked like trouble but he was let on the jet anyway.

– The report from Europe is that his name is Abdul and he comes from Sri Lanka.

Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!
– The report is this morning that Rudy Guliani is Time’s Person (nee Man) of the Year. The right choice. And we predicted it in our meaningless WarLog poll.

Only a mother could…
Bin Laden’s mother says he was really a nice boy.

Merry Christmas, hawks
– An early gift from the Guardian: a big juicy dish of roasted Christmas crow served up to the anti-war crew. Henry Porter writes an exemplary opinion piece saying that the war was right and rightly executed.

Well, it hasn’t ended like Vietnam; in fact the result has been a complete vindication of the plans devised by the Pentagon, of the Bush administration’s resolve and of Tony Blair’s support. [Times columnist Matthew] Parris has yet to concede that he and other prominent doves were wrong but while we wait, it’s worth recalling another sentence in his column which captures much of the venom that existed between the two camps during the jittery weeks of autumn: ‘But they (the hawks) will know who they are, and we can guess who they are: the people who went the extra mile, and urged the troops the extra mile, towards the battle-front, and who did so not because they had to but as a matter of personal judgment and moral choice.’

That is exactly right. Every journalist, academic and expert called upon in September to write about or debate what should happen had to make a difficult personal judgment. But it was not just the hawks who made a choice. The doves did too, and although at the time it seemed a safe bet that to opt for peaceful means in Afghanistan was to claim a kind of de facto high ground, it turned out to be the less courageous choice and now demonstrably the wrong one….

He goes on to show great understanding for what we went through on that day and the decisions that came out of that in the White House and at No. 10 and at every address in America:

One hundred and three days on, it’s difficult to recall precisely how shocking the attacks were. The balance went out of life; people were stopped in their tracks; they talked of nothing else but the attacks and response; old friends fell out during bitter arguments….

Let’s not forget how altered the world’s condition was by nightfall on 11 September. The diplomatic grid had completed changed. The stock markets were closed and the confidence of the capitalist West badly shaken. More important, perhaps, was the prevailing mood of insecurity, the sense that absolutely anything might happen in the coming weeks. It was in these circumstances that Blair pledged his support to the US….

But he has just begun to sharpen his knives. Now he goes for the jugular, deftly cutting the doves down, deftly showing that their stance was not the moral one when it comes to fighting evil, when it comes to knowing who your friends and allies are, when it comes to defending civilization:

It may have been that the doves had the world’s best interests at heart, but there was an anti-American agenda in the peace party which was abhorrent if only because these people would never talk about any other nation in the way they did about the US. The US is, after all, a democracy and its citizens were, after all, the victims of a bewilderingly violent attack.

I suppose I might have been tempted by the doves had I not gone to the World Trade Centre and seen the destruction. When I came away, I knew that this was a crime that had to be punished and that America had every right to defend itself against similar attacks in the future….

To my mind the most serious mistake of the peace party was its failure to stand up for the democratic achievements of the last 100 years and for the reign of liberal values in which we thrive and indeed possess the freedom to debate the enormous issues that now face the world. That is still something worth fighting for and I am unembarrassed by saying it….

The hawks may forgive but they won’t forget that this was, as Parris said, a matter of personal judgment and moral choice.

Bravo! And give credit even to the Guardian for printing an attack on its own.