Writing does not work, at least for me, when the writer is too obviously self-aware of the portent, the weight, the importance of his words even as he wrote them. Newspaper reporter as essayist has just never been a form that I've found particularly attractive.
Unfortunately, that is the form the Post's second writer on the desctruction of the sacred Dome yesterday (writing in a piece labelled "Images," which I take is a softer form of "News Analysis") slips into. As a result, it is difficult to know if his description of what terrorism is and how it works is literal, or meant to be purely descriptive.
Well, either way he's wrong.
Was. Is. Terrorism functions by conflating the categories. Old grievances are renewed, old tensions rekindled. The past, filled with the sting of injustice -- there's always enough to go around, no matter what small niche of the human race you occupy -- isn't so much remembered as it is constantly relived. There's no time for reflection, no time to come off the boil; humanity finds itself in a state of perpetual adolescence, short-fused and remarkably indifferent to whether it wants or expects to have a future.
Dude, whatever. Terrorism works by attacking things that will get the terrorist attention, and symbolic targets most definitely fit the bill. In fact what yesterday's attack demonstrates is why al Queda, which likes their attacks plenty bloody, has always aimed at targets with a symbolic component whether such targets were likely to produce a high body count or not, or, at the very least, continued to keep such targets on their list.
I've heard some suggest that until proven otherwise there was no reason to take Zarqawi's boys off the suspect list, and that makes sense to me.
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