Mezzrow posted the link in an earlier thread. I thought it needed more advertising. I’ve got to go get the book.

I just finished the Harris article. That’s really dynamite. Thanks for the link. I hope everybody else reads it. It’s of narrative-transformative quality. I know I’ll be rethinking the whole al Qaida mess for the next few days, but my prelimintary thought is that he’s got it right and the rest of us have completely missed the boat.

Maybe I was just playing at being a hippie, deep down inside I was a female John Wayne all along.

There have been a couple of times that I’m sure as hell glad you’re on our side. Gives me shivers just thinking of being on the other side

Yes, I see what you mean.

We all have our knee jerk reactions. The things that just make sense in light of everything we have believed.

I know I had to change a lot of preconceptions, or maybe not as many as I thought. Maybe I was just playing at being a hippie, deep down inside I was a female John Wayne all along.

What surprises me about my brother is that he lives in Oklahoma, he knows a lot of guys voting for Bush and they are not in anyway stereotypes.

But I think that he wanted to be cool so bad for so long that this is the club he thinks he wants to be in.

But common sense will prevail, I hope. It is hard to keep up that fantasy forever.

We’re all subject to competing narratives, none of which ever completely explains all of the facts available at the time. That’s fact one.

Fact two is the universal human tendency to believe what we want to believe, i.e., to select out that narrative which–all else being equal–is most pleasant among the alternatives.

Unfortunately, all else is never equal. It’s at this point that both the degree of ones honesty and the degree on ones tenacity enters the picture. A more honest or less tenacious person will reject a narrative contradicted by a minimal set of facts, a less honest or more tenacious person will maintain the pleasant fiction.

There is another issue, which is what might be called the depth of the narrative. I may not, for example, place too much currency on a theory concocted just today to explain something I had never seen nor thought about before. Who cares if I change my mind? On the other hand, some narratives are so deeply embedded within the fabric of the psyche that to toss them overboard in the face of a few inconvenient facts would be tantamount to tearing the entire persona to pieces. If there is no VRWC, then literally half a lifetime of thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interpretations will have to be reconsidered, perhaps bringing one to the entirely unacceptable belief that ones life has been largely misappropriated.

I’m not sure how best to change the deep narratives but I’m pretty sure that it won’t happen in a short time or by an easy path. I guess we should all strive to bring our personal narratives in line with the facts as much as we can. I’m still not convinced that the final narrative on Iraq has been written.

I’ll grant you in a second that I think Nixon should have responded more forcefully, and Kissenger’s notion of being the reincarnation of Metternich and playing realpolitik with the Soviets was, in hindsight, just flat-out wrong.

But, realistically, did Nixon have any hole cards to play?

Machiavelli was right; States need neither “love” nor irrational fear; but respect for the consequences when attacks are launched.

Unfortunately, Nixon IMHO started the calculus that the attacks were too “minor” to respond to (because the retaliation would be too expensive politcally and fiscally). Not realizing of course that the attacks were a constant direct challenge to the US and only escalated in nature as they became cost free.

So yeah, Nixon’s the One.

Well my brother did not hear it, he saw Moore’s film and when I try to point out that there are Democrats out there that feel differently he just goes off on right wingers.

No… I mean they have to kick Moore out of the DNC… they have to shun him. It is pointless for Clinton to go to some dinners and meetings and say the terrorists are bad guys, if they don’t banish the likes of Moore.

I am afraid if we have another attack the base of the Democratic party will blame the Republicans rather than face reality.

Clinton has said as much – he has supported the war and been open about his plans to invade, whihc Bush had the political capital to do and Clinton didn’t. It doesn’t matter. They’ll rationalize it somehow.

I fear that the lesson the Dems learned from Clinton is that one can achieve success by playing politics all of the time. That was less of an issue during our holiday from history in the 1990′s, but history has a way of reminding you that it is being ignored. The only antidote now is for the Dems to learn a new paradigm: which is most likely to come either in the form of more electoral defeats or a big attack that wakes their constituants from the 90s slumber (or perhaps both). Let us hope it is the former instead of the latter.