Some thoughts on imagination, deception, audacity and 911. I recall on the thirtieth anniversary, my mother saying that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. she went to work in Flint building machine guns in a converted auto plant, and later joined up as a WAC and went to Egypt. She’s been gone for twenty years now, and my father for thirty. Now the event is passing beyond living memory as their generation departs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

We failed to protect American soil from attack, however, which is the hard shock 9-11 shares with Pearl Harbor. Sept. 11 was another egregious failure of imagination linked with dismissive assumption. Al-Qaida declared war on the U.S., but American leaders preferred to treat the threat as criminal rather than military. Violent cults waging long-term cultural and theological struggles with the terms of social and technological modernity aren’t new. Their ability to employ massively destructive power at strategic distances is, however.

We continue, at our peril, to pretend we aren’t at war, and the current gang in the White House is particularly bad in this regard. Thinking that we defeated Jihad because we killed bin Laden is as mindless as thinking that we defeated the Japanese when we killed Yamamoto.

[Update a while later]

Memories of the Doolittle Raid. Note that they’re in their nineties now. I met Jimmy Doolittle about thirty years ago, when he was given an award at the Aerospace Corporation, where I was working at the time.