Responding to an idiot like Kingsolver is probably more trouble than it is worth...and about as easy as shooting fish in a goldfish bowl with a chain gun.

Oh, what the hell--I'm not doing anything else right now.

It is important to realize what class Kingsolver falls into. She is an author, of the sort of books that hit the Oprah Book Club list, win all those great awards, and show up in various newspaper "Review" sections. She is not a politician. She is not a left-wing philosopher. She is one of the many people, often found in Hollywood or the very best parties, whose intentions are good, but whose heart is so very much larger than her brain.

Now, a few comments...

I cannot find the glory in this day. When I picked up the newspaper and saw "America Strikes Back!" blazed boastfully across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall--shouldn't they reserve at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war?--my heart sank. We've answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out.

The "moral equivalence" horseshit is tossed into the very first paragraph. The deliberate attack on unarmed civilians by anonymous attackers is made equivalent to a military attack by flagged aircraft and vessels on military and strategic targets, while doing our damndest to MISS civilians. Speaking of raining death on a terrified populace, maybe Barbra wants to go back and check some Sept. 11 footage.

The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course--Afghanis have spent their lives learning terror of anything hurled at them from the sky. Meanwhile, the genuine food aid on which so many depended for survival has been halted by the war. We've killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee, plus four humanitarian aid workers who coordinated the removal of land mines from the beleaguered Afghan soil.

Throughout this article, you will notice the standard technique of firing vague statements that are intended to give the impression in one's mind that a fact has actually been passed along, although no such thing has occurred. "It is reported that these are untouched." I did a search, and to date have found no such "report." Of course, the Taliban would say something like that. "We've killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee..." I would love to see how this was documented. Again, a lot more mileage is gotten off those four aid workers. God, what if we had killed six?

That office is now rubble, and so is my heart. I am going to have to keep pleading against this madness. I'll get scolded for it, I know. I've already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I'm told I am dangerous because I might get in the way of this holy project we've undertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we've wiped out every last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country, to anywhere. I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure to the spirit of generosity in which they were offered. People threaten vaguely, "She wouldn't feel this way if her child had died in the war!" (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) More subtle adversaries simply say I am ridiculous, a dreamer who takes a child's view of the world, imagining it can be made better than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and drive.

The large heart, on full display, pumping aortal blood all over the clean carpet. This poor woman is honestly astonished and puzzled at the reaction she is getting, placing our soldiers in exactly the same category as the terrorist piloting planes full of screaming people into buildings containing tens of thousands of other unsuspecting people.

"A dreamer who takes a child's view of the world..."

This pretty much sums up her entire outlook. I'll bet money someone who knows her better than I used this exact phrase on her. A child places emotion above reason, and, unable to deal with abstractions, can only look at an issue by examining its surfaces.

I fight that, I fight it as if I'm drowning. When I get to feeling I am an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculous little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plain English that the last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling us we will win this war and not be "misunderestimated." We aren't standing apart from the crowd, we are the crowd.

Aha! The seething, frustrated Gore voter is never far below the surface. I'm sure they spend a lot of time calling each other on the phone to have a good cry about Florida. Note that she is not so "childlike" that she can't slide in a quick cheap shot at Bush's vocabulary, which seems to be the only microscopic foothold a lot of liberals can get on Bush.

There are millions of us, surely, who know how to look life in the eye, however awful things get, and still try to love it back.

Not look life in the eye, and see the reality of it. "Try to love it back." Barney the Dinosaur couldn't have said it better. And now, the eyes glaze, the parrot takes over, and the liberal wish list begins, drifting completely free of the Earth, and off into the clouds, unrestrained by nasty reality:

It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture and see that many nations with fewer resources than ours have found solutions to problems that seem to baffle us.

Name two. Hell, name one.

I'd like an end to corporate welfare so we could put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have done before us.

Many other nations? Again, name one.

I would like a humane health-care system organized along the lines of Canada's. I'd like the efficient public-transit system of Paris in my city, thank you. I'd like us to consume energy at the modest level that Europeans do, and then go them one better. I'd like a government that subsidizes renewable energy sources instead of forcefully patrolling the globe to protect oil gluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil gluttony is what got us into this holy war, and it's a deep tar pit. I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland's.

Whew! Stop to take a breath, already. She's been holding this in a long time. I'm not going to waste a lot more time debunking each of these, but you've heard most of it before.

And, of course, if Iceland were invaded, it would be the rest of the free world saving its frozen ass, so it's not like they need a military budget. Fact is, their military is pretty much us.

How can I take anything but a child's view of a war in which men are acting like children? What they're serving is not justice, it's simply vengeance. Adults bring about justice using the laws of common agreement. Uncivilized criminals are still held accountable through civilized institutions; we abolished stoning long ago.

The Taliban hasn't.

The World Court and the entire Muslim world stand ready to judge Osama bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a few billion dollars into food, health care and education instead of bombs, you can bet we'd win over enough friends to find out where he's hiding.

We have pumped over half a billion dollars into this godforsaken country over the last fifty years. If foreign aid made people love us, there would be six thousand parades in honor of the U.S. across the planet every day of the year. Typically, they take our money and spit on our shadows.

And I'd like to point out, since no one else has, the Taliban is an alleged accessory, not the perpetrator--a legal point quickly cast aside in the rush to find a sovereign target to bomb. The word "intelligence" keeps cropping up, but I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt."

People are getting hurt!! Holy stinking cats. I think I'll just let this statement stand out there all by itself, like a turd in a punchbowl. I can't believe she is amazed at people throwing mud at her.

They bombed one of our cities! Who started it is the ONLY issue.

I am somebody's mother[start saving for her therapy fund now], so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt. We need to take a moment's time out to review the monstrous waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don't win this one, guys. When there are people on Earth willing to give up their lives in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it's clear that we can't out-technologize them. You can't beat cancer by killing every cell in the body--or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This is a war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It will only end when we have the guts to say it really doesn't matter who started it, and begin to try and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.



We have always been at war, though the citizens of the U.S. were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until Sept. 11. Then, suddenly, we began to say, "The world has changed. This is something new." If there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please, in the name of heaven, I would like to see it. I would like to see it, now.



(boldface mine.)

"The issue is, people are getting hurt." If you have ever seen a perceptual mentality in action, this is it.

And if she, or any other peaceniks have figured out some way to meet someone halfway whose goal is your utter extinction, I would love to see it. Maybe allow them to only kill half of us? Any of these people volunteering to go to bin Ladin's cave and have a nice talk over a hot cup of tea?

Now, Barbara, I throw you through my handy home model Time Tunnel (pat. pending). You are suddenly standing in the Reichstag in the late 1930s. Standing before you is Hitler, along with all of his chief cronies.

Tell me what you will tell them to make them suddenly realize that they have been wrong all this time, and that the Jews should be treated as good German citizens and their rights restored.

It better be good.