JFK

42 years ago...

My generation's 9/11.

We all remember where we were. I was at Logan Airport in Boston waiting at the international terminal for a friend coming from the Philippines for a visit. My friend was a Mestizo, part Filipino, part Austrian, my father's best friend and doubles partner.

As I waited an oversized Irish state trooper, came to the door of customs and announced, seemingly more to his anguished self than to those of us standing there, "Some idiot in Dallas has taken a shot at the President."

"Was he hit?"

"We don't know."

Charlie cleared customs and, as we embraced, he asked me what I knew of Kennedy's well being. He was clearly as affected as I. I told him I had heard nothing. At the first traffic light, Charlie rolled down the wondow of my Nash Rambler and asked the woman stopped alongside us (I had no radio in my car) of word of the president.

"He's dead."

"Oh shit!" Charlie exclaimed (that word was only used in men's locker rooms in those days). The woman looked shocked. I always wondered whether she was more shocked by the assassination or by Charlie's profanity.

Our world changed that day, in ways we could not have imagined. And we will never know how many of those changes would have come had the young President not been shot. It was my introduction into the cruelty of reality. 9/11 came to me as confirmation.

Feminism, war and polls

It looks as if the feminsit movement has matured. They are fighting it out within their own ranks, a sure sign that it is no longer in its infant stage.

Maureen Dowd is out hustling her new book which, if its not humor, is being attacked by critics for her seeming not to understand that most of the world does not hang out, as she does, with those who are brokering the world's power. I think Maureen is a very funny writer; certainly she can raise conservative vitriol with a stroke of the pen. But is she a feminist?

Who can say?

Condaleeza Rice has been holding the feet of middle east leaders to the American fire, making headlines and likely driving those male chauvinists mad. Just when the Israelis and the Palestinians were ready to back away from the table and begin their bloody feud again, Madam Secretary chained them to their places until they negotiated a new access treaty for Palestinians in Gaza.

Hilary Clinton, who took her husband to Amman last week to tromp through the rubble of the suicide bombing that challenged our strongest Arab ally, has sounded more hawkish than most Democratic Senators even while she chides the president for a failed Iraq policy.

Are we being prepared for the passing of the presidential mantle to either Secretary Rice or Senator Clinton? Perhaps.

Bucking The Tide

My financial advisor believes that public opinion is almost always wrong. Or at least late. He has adopted the broker's notion that the market will do whatever it must to confound the most people.

He is also a rock ribbed Republican. And he believes that all the piling on Bush and the Republican conressionale leadership is a combination of media bias and misguided public hysteria.

But I think the taste of power is turning sour on the Republican pallet.

When the Democrats ran the country, initially, under FDR, they set up elaborate and effective systems for lifting ordinary Americans out of the financial ditch into which they had been thrown by the Great Depression. Most of those systems became permanent parts of the way we run the country, although the very conservative right wing would dearly love to dismantle most or all of them.

When the Democrats had been in power for nearly a half century, what began as smart humanitarian governing began to give way to corrpution and excesses. The Republicans, quite properly, ran successfully against that abuse of power.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans, having reset the agenda for a generation, are using their power to retain power rather than govern sensibly.

What remains unclear is what or who will follow this latest abuse of power. But follow it will.

Secret Prisons?

The CIA is rfefusing comment on reports that we are holding detainees in secret prisons.

No doubt many will say, so be it. Terrorism requires extraordinary measures.

But if we must turn our backs on everything we have stood for in order to defend ourselves, it seems to me that we have surrendered to those whose goal has been to undermine us and our institutions.

President Bush says the terrorists attack us because they hate our openness and our freedom.

That always seemed simple minded to me. But now that we are jettisoning our openness and our freedom, what is it that we are fighting to preserve?