God and Chick at Yale

Religious life was pretty much the last thing I cared about when I applied. (The chaplain's office sends each incoming freshman a little card asking you to describe your "relationship with God"; I wrote, "Fraught." Can't remember if I was snarky enough to actually mail it in though.)

From Eve Tushnet, as if you needed to be told.

Hearing from our Non-Attorneys - Tony Adragna e-mails to fact-check the ass of Unqualified Offerings re its citation of Shouting 'Cross the Potomac on the Moussaoui (non)plea:

A bit of clarification is in order: so as not to mislead anybody, Tony should be referred to as a "law librarian guy" (haven't gone to law school yet, but planning on it); 'tis the honourable gentleman from Virginia, my esteemed colleague Will, who made the observation that Moussaoui poisoned the jury pool -- I agree with the obsevation, but disagree that Moussaoui is anything like "clever".

The Talking Dog, however, really is a lawyer, or a big fat liar.

Liberal Revival - Unqualified Offerings would be remiss if it did not note that one of its favorite Demobloggers, "Charles Dodgson" of Through the Looking Glass, is back after an equipment-induced hiatus.

Judge Not - Tony Adragna, who is a lawyer guy, defends Judge Brinkema's decision to refuse Zaccarias Moussaoui's guilty plea (for now):

Moussaoui's own conduct before Judge Brinkema pretty clearly demonstrates that he really doesn't have a clue. Specifically, Moussaoui's own misunderstanding that a guilty plea would allow him to avoid "the maximum possible penalty provided by law" -- the death penalty -- probably was the most significant factor in the judge's decision to advise the defendant that he should think about it a bit more.

I'm not sure what Judge Brinkema is going to do when the defendant next appears before her. I hope that she accepts the plea, but there's perfectly good rationale for her not to do so -- sometimes defendants really do need to be protected from themselves, and some of those defendants turn out to be actually innocent. I think it worse to abandon a good rule simply because it also might help the guilty.

Tony argues that, in general, Brinkema is doing a good job presiding over a difficult case. Tony thinks Moussaoui is cleverly trying to poison the jury pool with an eye toward a mistrial. Meanwhile, fellow attorney The Talking Dog has a theory of his own:

Well, in the "life imitates art (if you can call sitcoms art)" department, we get the feeling that Zaccarias Moussouai ("the 20th hijacker") has watched a few too many episodes of Night Court.

Even our TD, though, wonders if "Moussaoui may actually be crazy like a fox...Look carefully at what he admitted: being a follower of bin Laden and a loyal al Qaeda member ARE NOT ACTUALLY CRIMES! Mr. Moussaoui also claims to have information about the conspiracy, though he does not admit that he was part of it." True, but we don't know everything Moussaoui may have confessed to had he been allowed to proceed.

Watch this space. Well, not necessarily this space. But some space.

TIPS Jar - Sorry to keep coming back to this one, folks, but some gifts just keep on giving. UO just really noticed some text in the banner over the official TIPS clubhouse website:

"A national system for
concerned workers to report
suspicious activity."

The workers! They really went all out on the East German angle, didn't they? At least if we do end up as a dictatorship, it will be a dictatorship of the proletariat.

An Open Letter to the Weblogging Community from the People of Iran

Hey guys: We got your note. As you say, you're free, we're not. Now, do we understand that the plan is for us to meet you in the middle?

Mojo Pomo - Protein Wisdom has a pretty interesting defense of postmodernism. No, Unqualified Offerings means it.

What Armed Liberal seems to be suggesting in his various posts is that postmodernism creates the groundwork for a totalitarian-driven misuse of master narratives. But this observation begs the question, because what postmodern philosophy does, simply, is reveals competing narratives already in existence, explains how such narratives came (and come) to be, and seeks to describe conditions under which they can be evaluated.

There's more.

Icthyoterror Watch: Regime-Change Edition - Maryland mulls its options in Crofton. Weapons of Mass Destruction are very much on the table.

They include antimycin A, a chemical that has been used elsewhere to control rampant carp populations, and explosives, which can blow the fish out of the water. And there's also the low-tech option of capturing the snakeheads with nets.

But a poison known as rotenone has been the hands-down favorite of fish experts facing similar dirty jobs. Derived from the ground-up leaves and roots of trees found in India and South America, it has been used since the 1940s as an agricultural pesticide and piscicide.

There is nevertheless a major role contemplated for ground troops:

"The water turns milky, the fish suffocate, and an air-breathing fish like the snakehead will come to the surface," said Walter Courtenay, a leading expert on invasive species who confirmed that the creatures were snakeheads. "If you've got enough people out there with dip nets, you can just capture these little guys on the spot."

Surely the Rittenhouse Review would ask, "Could such a conflict grow dangerously out of control?" The answer turns out to be Yes.

The use of rotenone has grown somewhat controversial in recent years after several cases in which the poison was used with unintended results. In one of those cases, California officials poisoned a public water supply while applying rotenone to Lake Davis, which had become overrun with nonnative pike.

About 30 years ago in Maryland, flies swarmed for miles over an inland beach on Assateague Island, where wildlife managers killed off thousands of fish in a failed attempt to test the effectiveness of rotenone against other techniques.

"It was a good idea, but the execution failed," said retired state biologist Nick Carter, who supervised the kill at Inlet Slough. Workers spent days cleaning dead fish off the beach, he recalled. "Everybody remembers it and laughs at me. It got pretty smelly."

Not All Cartels Are Bad notes Tom Burroughs of Libertarian Samizdata. For instance, governments like government cartels, such as the "tax cartel" many powerful, high-tax countries are trying to impose on lower-tax countries:

Such a cartel is the aim of the European Union, which in the name of tax "harmonisation" wishes to prevent countries, especially the United States, from setting taxes at rates lower than those in the EU. The EU, dominated in recent years by leftist governments hostile to the market, resents the way in which the Anglosphere nations have been able to outperform the EU in terms of growth and job creation.

Burroughs doesn't note that the tax cartels targets don't stop at the United States. They've also pressured small "tax haven" nations, such as those in the Caribbean.

Dog Bites Man - No sooner does Unqualified Offerings slag off Warblogger Watch than they slip a worthwhile post in. New WBW contributor The Rittenhouse Review discovers a delightful column by John Podhoretz urging Dubya to make an "October Surprise" from an early Iraq invasion.

There's a luscious double trap in starting the war as soon as possible, Mr. President. Your enemies are delirious with excitement about the corporate-greed scandals and the effect they might have on your popularity and the GOP's standing in November.

If you get troops on the ground quickly, they will go berserk. Incautious Democrats and liberal pundits will shriek that you've gone to war solely to protect yourself from the corporate-greed scandal. They will forget the lesson they so quickly learned after Sept. 11, which is that at a time of war the American people want their political leaders to stand together.

Your enemies will hurl ugly accusations at you, Mr. President. And at least one of them will be true - the accusation that you began the war when you did for political reasons.

But that won't matter. It won't matter to the American people, and it won't matter as far as history is concerned. History will record that you and the U.S. military brought an end to a barbaric regime on its way to threatening the world.

And as for the American people in 2002: They will rear in horror if you are criticized for beginning the war. The Republican Party will be able to marshal that horror, to use the liberal response to the war in Iraq to its great advantage. Rather than the GOP being on the defensive when it comes to its Achilles' heel, corporate greed, Democrats will be on the defensive when it comes to a key question about national security - their Achilles' heel.

Now, to be fair to Podhoretz, the man has wanted someone to invade Iraq for all of his professional life. Indeed, he is one of those neocons who would support practically any president, Republican or Democrat, who started a war with almost any country anywhere for any reason. So Podhoretz is not (quite) saying that "Mr. President" should invade Iraq for the domestic political benefits. Had Bill Clinton invaded Iraq, Podhoretz would have volunteered to wear the blue dress himself. Indeed, the article contains a familiar neocon staple, a thinly-veiled threat to turn on Bush should he somehow fail to crush the national aspirations of the Kurds - ahem. Effect regime change in Iraq...

But you, Mr. President, know you have no option but to end the war with Saddam Hussein out of office, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction safely in American hands and a new type of government in Baghdad. If you fail at that, it won't matter when you start the war - you're toast anyway, like your father was.

This is where someone like Justin Raimondo goes wrong, by the by. Yes, Podhoretz is not so much an Israeli partisan, or even a Likud partisan, as a Binyamin Netanyahu partisan. But it's unjust to say that a neocon like Podhoretz only wants war for the sake of Israel. Even if every Israeli citizen slept the sleep of the justly secure, even if every arab between the Med and the Galilee suddenly started bolt upright and said, "Say, I think I will go try Jordan, thanks!" and Bashaar Assad took lessons in the havah nagilah, the better to dance at his daughter's wedding, John Podhoretz and the Weekly Standard and most of the AVOT crowd would still be looking for an excuse to go to war with somebody - for the sake of our American souls. It's a national greatness thing.

As the Rittenhouse Review says

Would the world be better off without Saddam Hussein? Absolutely. But is going to war with Iraq really a good idea? We’re far from convinced. Could such a conflict grow dangerously out of control? Possibly. Would we face years of dangerous and deadly after-effects such as escalated terrorism here and abroad? We think so.

But hey, there are a couple of dozen House seats at stake! But UO is losing the thread, which is, it's nice to see WBW doing something besides baiting Pejman Yousefzadeh.

US: War with Kurdistan Inevitable - According to Wednesday's Washington Post, Turkey has named its price for supporting a US invasion of Iraq - $5billion in debt relief and a "guarantee that Kurds would not be given an independent state." In a more recent article in the Sidney Morning Herald, Turkish officials deny any grubby quid pro quo of support for money. In that same article, we read

[US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz] sought to ease Turkish fears that an attack on Iraq could create problems with Kurds who are demanding independence.

Since Kurdish fighters wrested control of northern Iraq from Baghdad after the Gulf War, the US has protected the breakaway region. But Mr Wolfowitz ruled out creation of a separate state, which Turkey opposes, fearing its own Kurdish minority would renew the fight for independence.

Can we clarify the picture? In a Wall Street Journal Article that ran on MSNBC.com on July 15, we read the following about troop level estimates for an Iraqi conquest:

“It was our belief that to go all the way to Baghdad, topple Saddam and stabilize the country it would require between 200,000 to 300,000 troops,” said one former Central Command official, who was involved in the planning at the time.
Most of those troops, however, weren’t seen as essential to the actual fighting, but rather to holding the country together after Mr. Hussein fell, this official said. Gen. Zinni and other senior Central Command officials never felt the military part was very difficult, said another former Central Command official. Rather, he argued that the largest portion of ground troops would be needed for two missions: to prevent Iraq, a country beset by severe ethnic divisions, from disintegrating into complete chaos; and securing Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons stores."

"Prevening Iraq from disintegrating" means preventing the Kurds in the North from achieving independence and preventing the marsh Arabs in the south from doing the same. Right now Saddam Hussein has that job, and the Kurds and Shi'a hate him for it. Now we are told that

o A US invasion of Iraq is "inevitable."
o The US will insist that post-conquest Iraq maintain its unity. (The Times of London reports that "AMERICAN troops would occupy Iraq for at least a year after toppling President Saddam Hussein to ensure the transition to a democratic regime, under plans being drawn up by the Bush Administration...Part of the consideration would be to prevent ethnic rivalries within Iraq or opportunism by neighbours such as Iran disturbing the country’s oil supplies.")

As Unqualified Offerings noted months ago, you cannot "prevent" people from doing something they don't want to do in the first place. That makes you and them adversaries. To say the US will "prevent" Iraq's Kurds from seceding from Iraq acknowledges that that is what they would like to do.

Which is to say, the Bush Administration is committing the US, by the logic of its position, to war with the Kurds. No doubt, when Kurdish terrorists begin to strike American targets, we'll hear that "they hate us because we're free."

In a weird way, it will even be true.

TIPS Jar - If you don't read NZ Bear's transcript of a real TIPS-program hotline call right now, the terrorists will have won.

(Along the same line, see today's TOM TOMORROW cartoon...)

This. That Also - Hit and run blogging before my gaming night.

Everything Nice - This Washington Post food reporter says the key to a perfectly seared steak is just a dusting of - sugar. (You might want to skip the article and cut straight to the recipe.) NOTE: This is not about grilling steaks over an open flame! This is about pan-searing. Which reminds Unqualified Offerings - the key to a consumable steak during indoor-cooking seasons is

1. Get an oil-free cast-iron skillet as hot as possible. Handy tool for knowing when it's time to add oil: your smoke detector.
2. When oil is hot, sear steak for a minute or two on each side, depending on thickness.
3. Finish in an oven preheated to 400^o. About 5 minutes for medium rare, longer if you might as well not bother to eat the thing at all.
4. Let stand, then cut.

Making Many Blogs - It's not quite a blog (yet), but antiwar.com has a new "columnist," summer intern Mike Ewens. It's not quite a blog (yet) because it only gets updated once a day. It's not quite a column, because it's actually a lot of little items, rather like, well, what you'd see in a blog. So far, Mike Ewens seems to be restricting himself to brief annotations of the news items linked on the antiwar.com index page. Perhaps he'll stretch his wings as he goes along. The first few days have been the website equivalent of "in this issue." Let Mike Ewens be Mike Ewens! is the rallying cry here at Unqualified Offerings.

Then if we don't like it we can bitch the kid out.

Got it Backwards Dept. - According to an AP article, "Ex-U.S. officials warn that U.S. policies threaten repression." Nonsense. UO believes that repression is not in the least bit threatened by current US policies. Indeed, it can expect to do quite nicely.

How Does That Work? Two horrible bombings in Tel Aviv today to go with yesterday's bus attack. Whenever Israel is between incursions and atrocities like this happen, critics announce that the attack(s) prove that "the policy of appeasement is bankrupt." Since Israel is currently in full smackdown mode in the territories, will those same critics now claim that "the policy of the hard-liners is bankrupt?" Developing...

Imitation Tech Blog Item Follow-Up - Avedon Carol writes that she already uses Mozilla, not Opera, and enjoys the benefits of "Refuse Evil Pop-Up Windows Only." UO has now used Mozilla enough to say that it really is slower than NS, IE or Opera, at least on pages with lots of small graphics. UO has a cable modem and can live with the speed drawback. Calculate your own tolerance according to your own situation.

Blood Pressure Check - Just in case you suffer from hypotension, check out "One Hundred Records You Should Remove From Your Collection Immediately." No matter who you are, there should be something to piss you off. My favorite quip:

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" IS the "Stairway to Heaven" of our generation, folks. This is the record you will embarrass your children with.

Whether you love U2, Pink Floyd, Beck or Dave Brubeck, your ox gets gored.

[Unqualified Offerings does not necessarily endorse the views expressed by the author.]

Watching Done Right - Michael Croft calls blogging "the safe sex version of Usenet." That would make Warblogger Watch the "standing on a subway car waving its dick at people version of Usenet." The ratio of locker-room towel-snapping to pertinent argument is skewed. Sully Watch is reduced to livening up its unending gay and class-baiting with complaints about, of all things, Andrew Sullivan's line spacing. By running out of gas comparatively early, Instapunditwatch may actually have taken the wisest available course.

All of which still leaves a legitimate job, keeping after the excesses of a group called warbloggers, crying out to be done effectively by someone.

Ladies and gentlemen, Steven Chapman (Nee Daddy Warblogs) is your man.

There's a bad smell in the blogospheric air right now. Ten months ago, 3,000 Americans were murdered in their workplace by al-Qa'eda operatives at the behest of Osama bin Laden. President Bush immediately said he was going to "find the folks that did this and bring them to justice," and the world said: "Fine - we're with you all the way on this." So America, with the (albeit often modest) aid of great number of countries, invaded Afghanistan to try to catch or kill bin Laden and as many al-Qa'eda members as possible. Unfortunately, this is where it all started to go wrong. The Taleban were overthrown - great news if you're Afghan - but bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Several operations were set into motion (Anaconda, Snipe etc.) to catch or kill those al-Qa'eda still at large, all of them ending in failure. We were then told that finding bin Laden was no longer important, and that al-Qa'eda are bigger than one man, and other similar sentiments. We were told it was a great success that we had managed to disrupt al-Qa'eda for a time. And the warblogosphere and a great deal of the US media went right along with this transparent attempt to disguise what was in fact an abject failure to apply the very justice the US set out to apply at the outset. Attempts by individuals to draw attention to this failure and ask: "What about bin Laden?" were derided as either politically-motivated, anti-American, or just plain stupid. The warblogosphere went along with this derision too.

Oh there's more. It is not going to be as easily dismissable as the grabass antics of some other critics either.

Thinking Ahead - Unqualified Offerings got e-mail today from The Talking Dog about the TIPS program. (Pause for readers to grimace at the thought of a correspondence between writers who insist on referring to themselves in the third person.) TD is still hot on his plan to bring Israel and Palestine into the Union as the 51st and 52nd state, and mulled what they could bring to the TIPS table.

I commend you for pointing out just how perfectly consistent with democracy and freedom the idea of adding 1,000,000 new governmental informants to our existing rolls is. On top of which, since the citizen informants will probably rat out their friends, neighbors and family members out of patriotic duty, this needn't even be a budget buster (Andrew Sullivan, for example, would HATE to create yet another middle class entitlement program- even for something as patriotic as ratting out our potential enemies- at a time when we shouldn't even be creating an entitlement for prescription drug benefits for our already pampered senior citizens!)

Obviously, the TIPS squad will be, by design, far more helpful than prior comparable efforts, such as the irritatingly inefficient House UnAmerican Affairs Committee, and other cooperating law enforcement agencies of their day. It better be: we're talking about terrorists who threaten our way of life! We'll be damned if we'll fall back and kvetch about the willy nilly personal freedoms this country has had for centuries: then the terrorists will have won!

But we DO have to ask: what about the TIPS squad in the newest stars on the flag, Israel (the six-sided star) and Palestine (the star with a crescent and sword through it)? I'm pretty sure this will work well in Israel, as there are enough Russian immigrants pining for those happy KGB days who will doubtless be delighted to sign up! (In fact, we can enourage a lot of them to move to North America, so we can avoid having to rely too heavily on ex-Stasi members!)

Across the formerly green (and now red,white and blue) line in Palestine, I'm more troubled. These people have grown up on a place where the only thing against the law is ratting for the Israelis: and it was a death penalty offense. How do we convince these folks that now that they are AMERICANS, it is no longer their patriotic duty to BE and to ENCOURAGE terrorists, but their patriotic duty to INFORM on their friends and neighbors plotting attacks on the former Zionist entity and its new master? I don't know... I think we might have to rely on more expensive law enforcement methods there (such as dawn to dusk, shoot to kill curfews). Maybe we shouldn't have been so hasty to merge Mossad and IDF and into Homeland Security...

Unqualified Offerings can't hang with that commie stuff about prescription drug entitlements, but the rest seems very forward-thinking. The Talking Dog, ladies and gentlemen. He'll be here all week...

The Pursuit of Happiness - A longtime favorite site of Unqualified Offerings, Libertarian Samizdata, has moved to a new domain and a new content platform to become Samizdata.net. They now have not only date-based archives, and category-based archives, but also Author archives. So you can find all the posts by your favorite Samizdatist (or Samizdatette) in one place.

On the "It always has to be about me" front, there's no Posh Blog Stops link section anymore, so Unqualified Offerings isn't on it. It is thrown in with the hoi polloi at the bottom of a big long list^*. A constant source of UO's pride and delight is no more. But this can be an occasion for growth and, um, more growth.

In another widely-anticipated move, "Daddy Warblogs" has changed its name to Brendan O'Neill Watch. Kidding! It has changed its name to Steven Chapman, because Daddy Warblogs name is Steven Chapman. UO's fondness for Stephen Chapman remains wholly one-sided, but you should read his site anyway. Sniff.

^* While staying at the ABC Motel last week, UO thought to regret not naming itself "AAA Blog" or something yellow-pagey like that.

Imitation Tech Blog Follow-Up Item - Charles Kuffner e-mails to say that Mozilla, the open-source version of the Netscape 6 kernel or vice verse or something, actually has a "Reject Evil Pop-Up Windows Only" feature.

It has a feature which lets you suppress *unrequested* windows, which is surely the spirit of what Jim is asking, since one clearly requests popup comment windows. I've adopted Mozilla at home, and this feature does exactly what you'd want it to do. It's fantastic

In an "And they say bloggers never do research" move, Unqualified Offerings downloaded and installed Mozilla this evening and tested it out. UO was able to suppress the pop-up ads on the Washington Post and LA Times sites, yet open and post to the comment windows on Arref Mak's fine (if hard to read) gaming weblog, Shadow Thriller.

That is pretty darn cool.

UO's initial subjective opinion is that Mozilla loads pages and images more slowly than IE6 and NS6. Then it realized: It's been using IE6 and NS6 for long enough that they're pulling an awful lot of their graphics from cache space. So Mozilla deserves a chance to prove its speedworthiness.

(Note to Bloggers, like NS6, Mozilla does not display the formatting buttons in Movable Type. It may make sense to keep your MT application open in IE while using Mozilla to surf those pornBig Media sites and such that provide your blogfodder.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home. Sign me up."

Andrew Sullivan

Until now, the "sign me up" part of the much-epigraphed quote above has seemed a mere rhetorical flourish. But now, for Andrew Sullivan and other joiners, comes the TIPS squad. TIPS stands for Terrorism Information and Prevention System. The pilot program aims to recruit one million confidential informants from "American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others." They aim for an order of magnitude more...tipsters once the thing really gets going.

There are bound to be some shakeout problems. UO recommends that CitizenCorps seed the pilot rolls with qualified, experienced personnel, who may need to be drawn from overseas. Most of the babushkas who used to keep watch over Moscow hotels are probably dead. But there should be a lot of Nicaraguan block wardens left over from the Sandinista era, and of course any number of savvy East Germans. We could reward them for their service by putting them on an expedited citizenship track. The citizenship application process should anyway be getting quicker as hopefuls find there is less and less of the Constitution they need to learn.

(Andrew Olmsted rightly notes that "the passengers of Flight 93 reminded us all that in the end, it is our own responsibility to protect ourselves against evil." I doubt this is what he, or they, had in mind.)

Tech Blog Impersonation Item - From Avedon Carol's Sideshow, Unqualified Offerings learned of the Opera 6 browser's ability to suppress pop-up windows. Cool! It really works.

This is a great boon when visiting Big Media sites. (Or porn sites...) Warning: Some weblogs enable a comments feature, and the comments appear in a popup window. Opera will suppress them too, if you turn on "Refuse Pop-Up Windows." There is no "Refuse Evil Pop-Up Windows Only" in Opera 6.02. (Maybe the next version?)

Opera 6.x also renders the Highclearing family of sites just fine, thank you. (NS4 chokes on Thought-Records, the Nobilis blog, though NS6 handles it fine.) The free version of Opera places a tasteful inline ad in the top right corner of the browser tool bar. The pay version eliminates it.

The DC City Council Fights for its...Constituents by awarding itself the same exemptions from city parking laws that members of Congress get. Says the Washington Post:

The ticket exemption legislation was not presented to any committee or raised in a public hearing. The issue came up once -- at a July 2 legislative session on "technical" amendments to several District laws, such as grammatical changes and boundary changes for advisory neighborhood commissions.

Council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large), chairman of the council committee that oversees parking issues, proposed the exemption from the dais and portrayed it as a matter of home rule. The discussion lasted a few minutes with only mild expressions of concern before it passed on a voice vote.

Last night, Schwartz said there was "something not right" about depriving council members of the same opportunities to park in the District on official business as enjoyed under city law by members of Congress. She said expanding the list of those covered by the law to council members was a home rule issue and "made sense to me."

A grateful city would surely have exulted in this blow for dignity and justice, if only they'd had a chance to cheer their representatives on. Unqualified Offerings is, frankly, surprised, that ordinary District residents (for instance, Eve Tushnet!) didn't actually mount a letter-writing campaign urging the Council to take this step long since. With a Council so dedicated to them, how can they fail to reciprocate?

Poetry Sunday - I'll probably keep posting poems at the rate of one a week or so until enough people beg me to stop. They won't be new things I've just dashed off, because I'm not dashing any poems off these days. I'll be sticking to the firm's back catalog and, by and large, the arguably political poems therein. Posting unpublished poems here likely queers them for most legacy-media journals, but I no longer much care. Here they'll get read. (Unless you bleep over them, as is your right.)

The following poem risks some confusion as to season. UAL93 went down, of course, in late summer. The first part of this poem describes Somerset County (site of the crash) in springtime, the season I most associate with that area, because of the maple syrup festival held there annually. Lastly, the poem was written last fall. Readers of the prose item below will know that the poet didn't actually get to Shanksville until this week. The poem bridges the temporal difficulty - describing a visit months before it actually took place - by means of a literary device known as the Bald-Faced Lie.

Shanksville

Here where the locals drive the spigot spikes
heart high in maple trunks in March, and hang
buckets to catch the broth the season brews,
spring is a quarrel of storm fronts. I remember
clumping along the barricaded streets
of Somerset in festival week, breathing
into my schoolboy hands to warm them, vendors
selling anything maple – jugs of syrup,
the lumps of candy at once sweet and acid.

We need things. We don’t shy from taking them.
Near where the plane crashed, a strip mine scabs over.
When the men drove the plane into the ground
we cannot hallow, it became their plane,
the plane they must have felt they needed more
than anything. And what they tapped thereby
was what we needed more than anything.
It is astringent, even bitter but
it lights like cognac and it warms our guts.

© 2002 by Jim Henley