“America has become to the rest of the world as Israel is to the Middle East,” writes Sam Smith in his daily online compendium “Undernews” (September 11), “a moated castle massively armed, ready for vengeance, suppression, and revenge, yet incapable of defending itself against shoe bombs and box cutters, or the lone attacker to whom suicide seems the only option. This irony is not only without resolution, it is driving us mad. Like Israel, we have traded our ideals, our decency, and our raison d’etre for the illusion of safety and the transitory satisfaction of retribution. We are destroying ourselves rather than admit we have been wrong and must now try another way.”
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Where the wild things are. In a letter to Chicago Wilderness (Fall), a Montrose Harbor security guard recalls a fox that “ran right past my car….First I saw the big fat rat, so fat it could not run or even walk very fast, and then, a few minutes later, I saw that same rat hanging out of that fox’s mouth as it ran past me.”
One more thing Europeans do better. Therapist Esther Perel writes in the September-October Utne: “Ironically, some of America’s best features–the belief in equality, consensus-building, fairness, and tolerance–can, in the bedroom, result in very boring sex.”
