Rodent Regatta

You get used to it, the clerk said. I didnt know if she meant the song or the knifings in the breakroom. [The Bleat]

With threats that sound more real than before, read The Bleat and read this.

Apparently, they really want to get to us again. While so many are singing the praises of a decent year for stocks and business growth, there is still something fragile and tenuous about our recovery. Another blow – in any of several forms – could bring us to our knees once more. Now is a time for great trust. We simply have to trust the intelligence community. We have to trust what we’re being told. We have to trust God. As individuals, we have no ability to fend off the kinds of threats that international terrorists plot and plan.

I can deal with a lone idiot. So can you. When plots involving commercial aviation and foreign pilots are the methods of attack, what can an individual or a family do? We simply have to trust.

More from James Lileks:

”Like it or not, know it or not, weve always been about five days from a complete bout of transglobal nastiness since 9/11. It all depends on the provocation. But if nothing happens we may never learn what they stopped.

Who knows. Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny commercial or the idea of gradiations of concern will strike us a luxury, a contrivance, a flimsy thing that marked the interregnum between the day the war began and the day it flared hot coast to coast. Im betting on the former. The worst rarely happens. Something just as bad often comes along, but its not what we foresaw or worried about. Then we learn that a short period of coping can be preferable to a long period of fearing.

It will end, one way or another. But there wont be any signing of papers on carrier decks; nothing that tidy. No Times Square parties. It began as a long slow subterranean process where the murderers gather and bond, and the end will be slow and constant and maddeningly indistinct. Imagine boxing gloves unraveling the strands of a thick wet rope; thats the next ten years. It wont make sense all the time. The narrative will drift. In 2031 the BBC will put out a 22 hour documentary on the War, and our children will think we all lived in an age of constant peril and heroism.

We will have to remind them that peril and heroism was reserved for those volunteered for a full ration of both. Most of us saw the war on TV. If we felt it at all, it was the pang we got when consulted our 401(k) statements. The stores were full of things; meat and sugar for everyone. The vast majority of Americans hardly felt the war at all and while that may have been a blessing, it didnt feel altogether right. There was something about Orange that said we should do something, and we had no idea what that might be.”