Senseless Wreckage

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Everyone should pay heed to the words of Justice Brandeis. No one will, of course. At least not the people who matter; the people who issue orders from the Pentagon or those who declare murderous fatwas from the far-flung redoubts of the Baluchistan and the Hindu Kush. I'm sure almost everybody else understands these words. But we don't make the headlines. We're inconsequential. We die, but our opinions don't matter.

There's a troublesome phrase in the final clause of Brandeis's statement. "...well meaning but..."

Well meaning? Today a small cell of absolute maniacs attempted to detonate a series of bombs in London. The timing, placement and intent of those bombings was virtually identical to the bombings in London just two weeks ago. Both incidents mirror the bombings last year in Madrid and, if recent reports are accurate, forecast similar attacks in Italy. How can the phrase "well meaning" apply to anyone who would commit these acts?

Well, they apply it to themselves. And they mean it. Take a moment to absorb the following snippet of self-righteous hate mongering:

"Let the mighty eagle soar...

Soar with healing in her wings
As the ground beneath her sings
Only God, no other kings
Let the might eagle soar"

That's an original tune by Attorney General John Ashcroft. You should hear him sing it. One can almost hear the ground beneath--or more to the point, the people who live on the ground beneath--wondering aloud, "Oh, so it's healing in those wings."

The point is this: a fraction of a fraction of a fraction carried to nine decimal points of the population is responsible, directly responsible, for this mayhem. The rest of us are just caught in the crossfire. The rest of us don't generate the headlines in the morning papers or the lead story out of the mouths of talking heads. We just consume the information. And we fear.

The only power anyone holds over us is the power we give away.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

We are in the grips of a dilemma here at RadioSubRosa headquarters. We've run into a wall. This is especially troublesome because, well, we don't have any walls. We dont't even have cubicles. RadioSubRosa exists entirely in dataspace. We leave it up to our readers and listeners to invoke the appropriate Newtonian rag doll physics and Looney Toons sound effects.

Months ago we undertook our latest audio collaboration. Ideas were bandied about, musical tracks chosen, sound bites collected and processed, themes discussed, and many, many beers were consumed. Then something odd happened: we looked at each other and telepathically exclaimed, "Don't do something! Just sit there!"

This approach was so successful that weeks and months flew by with nary a hint of progress. We learned to avoid each other at social events -- I personally haven't seen our ace audio engineer The Safety Wolverine in weeks -- and, when circumstances conspired to bring us face to face, we distracted one another with small talk and protracted bar tab negotiations. Left to our own devices, we could keep this up forever.

Then...

The other night Slack and I met at Junior's Tavern -- a local watering hole with a gravitational field so powerful that doctoral candidates and aspiring musicians alike are simply absorbed into terry cloth rags and wrung out in the morning -- in order to hold some High Level Talks. (Numerous calls to The Safety Wolverine went unanswered and unreturned, likely due to the miracle of Caller ID.)

"Why not," Slack proposed, his pupils rapidly assuming the size and shape of wraparound sunglasses, "kick this out to the world-at-large? Slap it up there, as is, and let the goddamn world mix it."

"That's demon talk, Slack," I replied. "Demon talk."

Join us, citizens. Listen, contribute, and collaborate.