Chasing elusive victories

Last night’s announcement was as unexpected as it was momentous.  After a lazy Sunday spent watching movies and eating Chipotle and chocolate chip cookies, I was sitting in bed, minutes away from going to sleep, when Sarah sent me a gchat message: “something ridiculous is about to go down, I think.”  Turning on the TV around 10:30, I soon became aware of two things, only one of which was a new revelation: Osama bin Laden was rumored to be dead and Wolf Blitzer is best viewed on mute.

Leading up to and immediately following Obama’s brief, confident speech, many – both on TV and among my friends – began to speculate about the implications of the strike, for al Qaeda, for national security, and for the 2012 presidential election.  The latter, to me, seems particularly silly to contemplate, since that circus is more than a year and a half away.  All of the rest will become clearer with time.

Also interesting to me has been the joyous reaction to this news.  I remarked to Maggie last night, after seeing video footage of the giddy mob gathering outside the White House, that I thought it would be fun to be down there.  She thought it might be kind of strange to be celebrating someone’s death, which I agree with, to an extent.  Andrew Sullivan pointed me toward a nice piece by Russell Arben Fox, capturing pointedly the moral dilemma that bin Laden’s death presents.

The moral plane of the universe is not somehow improved by the killing of a man. “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he is overthrown”–the author of Proverbs had it right.

I believe all that….but I still think he deserved it.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Osama bin Laden was a malevolent mass murderer.  He directly and brutally attacked our country on 9/11 and has continued to orchestrate appalling acts of terrorism all around the world.  Aside from callously ripping apart thousands of families, his actions have baited our country into two quagmire wars, provoked reprehensible and inexcusable backlashes against Muslims, and severely battered our national psyche.  That that monster is dead should be a cause for celebration, if only of the fact that he can no longer wreak such suffering on the world.

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post powerfully evokes his memories from 9/11, and makes a similar argument.

Triumphalism and unapologetic patriotism are in order….

In the days to come, there will be time to consider the nuanced implications of Osama bin Laden’s demise at the hands of the CIA. Will anti-American anger threaten to send unstable Pakistan out of control? Will al-Qaeda’s younger, more decentralized leadership feel not bereft but empowered? In a few days or weeks, I might care. But not now….

We got the son of a bitch.  Well done.

In these times of unconventional warfare, we have few signature battles with which to define our progress.  We always win, because no group or nation can match our military power, yet we also perpetually lose, because it is close to impossible to defeat an ideology, embodied by a shadowy, decentralized network of radical extremists.  Iraq and Afghanistan have featured a decade of murky skirmishes and offensives, and neither conflict will end cleanly with the surrender of a rival, as in World War II.  True victory is elusive.

This is why yesterday’s raid was so important.  In a way, Osama bin Laden was the sole-remaining, widely recognized face of our enemy.  Killing him may or may not ultimately make our country safer, but it has been enormously cathartic for the American people.  Crowds in DC and New York and around the nation took to the streets last night because we are not going to get the euphoria of a VJ Day, and everyone knows it.  So if shooting a diabolical terrorist brings even a small sense of closure to some of the cruel injustices of the past decade, I consider that a worthy cause.

Sprucing up a spring sandwich

Save maybe for a few slices of a perfectly ripe avocado, I've decided recently that delicious bread may have more power to improve a sandwich than any other standalone ingredient.  I don't know why this comes as such a revelation to me, seeing as how I have always been a sucker for a crusty, freshly baked baguette.

This train of thought started about a month ago, while preparing Kevin's birthday dinner.  We were serving a trio of sliders: crab cakes, marinated grilled chicken, and stuffed lamb burgers.  While shopping, I started thinking about different ways to create small buns, since regular hamburger buns were too large.  Loaves of pita bread seemed like an obvious choice for the lamb burgers, but I couldn't find small ones, so we just ended up eating everything on sliced dinner rolls, which worked out ok.

More recently, I grilled up some chicken, marinated in buffalo sauce, with the intention of eating it like a burger.  Instead, I found myself craving one of the Trader Joe's handmade tortillas sitting in the fridge.  We had several leftover from a fajita dinner and I had been devouring them plain, warmed up nicely in a hot skillet.  So I ended up shredding the grilled chicken, dousing it with more buffalo sauce, and wrapping it up in a tortilla with lettuce, tomato, red onion, and a drizzle of blue cheese dressing.  As an added bonus, the one piece of chicken made enough for two wraps, so I got to eat a second while lying to myself that it was an equivalent amount of food.

And just this weekend, Joe, Kevin, and I got a craving for deli subs.  Instead of one of the pre-packaged, sort of soft sub rolls, we bought a baguette from Safeway and cut it into thirds.  It made a perfect sandwich roll.  The next day, I repeated the process with some of the leftover turkey, along with tomatoes, goat cheese, and arugula from the farmers' market.

We may have cut down, recently, on the practice of devouring loaves of bread, dunked in olive oil, before dinner every night, but it seems I have craftily identified another way to ingest my regular quota of delicious carbohydrates.

Drawing with crayons on eggs

Managed to find some time this afternoon, in between church, the farmers' market, mowing the lawn, and preparing for family dinner to indulge in an Easter favorite of mine: dyeing eggs.  I particularly like drawing on them with crayon beforehand (so much so that I made a special trip to CVS to buy a pack of Crayolas for almost $3), because of all of the creativity it inspires.

Until relatively recently, I lacked the context to celebrate Easter for religious reasons.  Dyeing eggs has always featured prominently in my understanding of this holiday and it continues to do so.  I find it comfortingly childish and, admittedly, really fun.  Moreover, the bright colors and happy spirit of the whole exercise seems in keeping with everyone's joyful mood on this day.  The challenge now, I guess, will be to eat a dozen hard boiled eggs in the next few days before they go bad.

Happy Easter!

THREE anniversaries

I can't believe I missed this one.  Not counting the test runs of the prototype Enterprise, yesterday was also the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight.  Columbia, the first of NASA's fleet, began its first orbital test flight on April 12, 1981.

Now that the shuttle program is winding down, NASA has announced (also yesterday) the final resting places of each of the three remaining shuttles and the Enterprise.  The lucky museums will get an iconic piece of American and world history - a vehicle whose image has been synonymous with space travel for longer than my entire lifetime and whose adventures have been inspiring a generation of children and adults alike.

The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (my favorite) will get Discovery, NASA's oldest surviving shuttle and its most accomplished.  It has flown the most missions, ferried numerous luminaries to space, and led the return to flying after both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.  Ever since I saw it blast off from afar in Florida one time, I've had a soft spot for Atlantis, but this is very exciting news nonetheless.  Discovery is the fleet's unofficial flagship, in a way.  It has already been retired and, in a year or so, anyone will be able to visit it - to touch a piece of history, to stand closer to outer space than we may ever physically get, and to dream.

Two notable anniversaries

Today marks a pair of momentous anniversaries, each recalling a very different period of history, yet both, in a way, reinforcing the power of human spirit and innovation.

On this day in 1861, 150 years ago, Confederate soldiers in South Carolina fired the first shots of the Civil War.  After the state seceded, Union troops barricaded themselves in Fort Sumter, on an island in the mouth of Charleston’s harbor, and Confederate forces attacked.  What followed was a bloody, protracted, four year slog over slavery and the intersecting authority of the states and the federal government.  Over 620,000 Americans died in this conflict – roughly the same number of casualties as in all other wars combined – and they were fighting over the preservation of both our country and, indirectly, our brand of representative democracy.

Abraham Lincoln expressed the gravity of the stakes most famously in his Gettysburg Address:

...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Another eloquent paean to the triumph of American democracy comes from Sullivan Ballou’s well-known letter to his wife, Sarah.  Ballou, a major of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers in the Union army, expresses the emotions he is feeling on the eve of a major battle, and captures heartrendingly his conflicting loves of family and country.  The version below comes from Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, and is set to Jay Ungar's beautiful musical piece "Ashokan Farewell."  Its poignancy drives me to tears.

Both Ballou and Lincoln would likely be saddened by some of the anti-government rhetoric saturating the nation these days.  I have no issue with people who believe in the efficacy of conservative, market-based solutions to our country’s problems, but we must never cast our government itself as an antagonist.  So much has been sacrificed in the building of this institution and every American should live with an abiding sense of reverence for the system – this nation that we have struggled to develop and maintain - even when we may disagree over specific actions and policies.

Exactly a century after Fort Sumter, 50 years ago, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.  Until seeing Google’s “doodle” banner today, I had no idea these dates coincided.  A very cool side-note, this website tells you when satellites will be passing overhead in the night sky wherever you live – apparently this week is an excellent time to spot the International Space Station.  Where the Civil War was, in some ways, a test of the durability of one of humanity’s most important developments in civil and political philosophy, Gagarin’s spaceflight was a showcase of ingenuity and innovation.  Though set, at the time, against the grim backdrop of the Cold War, we can now celebrate this milestone for what it was – our first breach of the final frontier of human exploration.

That both of these important events came at times of great tension and conflict is, perhaps, no coincidence.  For better or for worse, it seems that much of our greatest progress has been born out of necessity, during times of danger.  With that in mind, when confronted by tough situations, we can, I suppose, only aspire to do right by our forebears and hope that the lens of history views us kindly.

The sky is falling

A lot has been happening lately, and little of it is particularly encouraging.  My seeming inability, of late, to formulate blog posts about current events has been a fueled by a combination of laziness and oversaturation.  Listening to NPR and reading the news every day makes it feel like there is little new to be said.  But, looking back at my blog sometime in the future, I’d like to at least pay homage to this tumultuous period of world history, depressing as it is.

One of the primary reasons the world feels like it’s falling apart is Japan.  A 9.0 earthquake there last month triggered a tsunami that decimated the coastline, killed tens of thousands of people, and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  The facility has been hovering in various stages of meltdown for weeks, forcing large scale evacuations of the surrounding area and releasing radioactive material into the sea.  Sarah, whose opinion I trust on all things nuclear, feels that this disaster will wind up being worse than Chernobyl, most acutely because we simply do not know what exactly is being released into the environment.  The common radioactive iodine has a very short half-life, and will dissipate in a matter of days.  But if other, more enduring radioactive elements are being released into the sea, they could stick around for decades, wreaking as yet unpredictable havoc on the seafood industry and, more generally, human health.

Domestically, the federal government appears to be on the verge of shutting down.  Not only is this bad for the workers who will be, in essence, temporarily unemployed, it is bad for the economy on so many different levels.  Federal government contracts are affected.  People won’t be getting their paychecks and won’t have as much money to spend.  Tourism, especially in a place like DC, is severely hampered.  Yet instead of continuing to work on a compromise, as midnight ticks closer, Harry Reid and John Boehner have spent the afternoon squabbling over the source of the impasse.  Also, the Republican 2012 presidential primary field looks to be a mix of crazy, crazier, and opportunistic fools that abandon principle pander to the far right.  And the long term deficit is going to swallow our country whole if we do not confront it in a mature way, something Obama has, so far, proven unwilling to touch and many Republicans only pretend to care about, by exempting defense spending and revenue generation from the conversation.

One bright spot has been the empowering revolutions across the Middle East.  Although it will, unfortunately, prevent me from traveling there for some time, watching the people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up peacefully to demand democracy was heartwarming.  It’s fascinating to watch the spread of these movements across the region, and to observe the differing reactions of each regime.  Unfortunately, this too has been dragged down, of late, by the violence of Col. Gaddafi in Libya and the resulting Western military intervention.  I support the cause, in theory at least, but cannot help feeling wary of getting involved in yet another war.  I hope the Obama administration’s rhetoric on this issue proves true, and that the Gaddafi regime collapses soon enough to avoid a long, protracted commitment of US forces there.  We really can't afford it, financially, psychologically or, perhaps most importantly, from a national image standpoint in the Middle East.

There is so much that’s good and beautiful in the world, but, at times, I have trouble focusing on it through all of the raucous, worrying trouble that we face.

"But I wouldn't miss it for the world"

My sentimental nature aside, it speaks, I think, to the filmmaking genius of Pixar that I can't so much as think about Toy Story without feeling an emotional pang.  That trilogy illustrates so perfectly the nuanced, sometimes alarming process of growing up and, in fact, tracks quite well with the chronology of my life.  It debuted when I was in elementary school as a cool movie about toys and friendship and wrapped up during my mid-20's, playing well with my growing sense of nostalgia for the passing years.

The video below is a tribute to 25 years of Pixar animation.  There are several films in there that I have not seen but, bolstered by the Toy Story clips, those that I have made watching this a heart-warming, poignant way to spend five minutes.

A busy March

I've had a hectic month, with several deadlines at work and commitments on the weekends.  The world has been busy lately too, and I've been following the events of the Middle East, North Africa, and Japan with a mixture of awe, sadness, and fascination.  I want to put voice to some of these thoughts, and hope to in the coming days.  But first, an update on my own adventures.

I just got back from a long weekend in Ireland.  Reminiscent of my 2009 jaunt to Germany, this trip cropped up very quickly.  Spurred by a cheap plane ticket and the flexibility of having just finished a project at work, I booked the trip a mere week before leaving.  After some hectic, cursory planning and a serendipitous encounter at a DC bar, Jimmy, Dan, Dave, and I set off for Ireland.

Our first stop was Belfast, the largest city in the North, which is still a part of the United Kingdom but, after many years of discord and violence, is largely at peace with the Republic of Ireland in the south.  Similar to Berlin and Dresden, Belfast is packed with very interesting, recent history.  It is also a lively, young city, with a large university and eclectic restaurants near our hostel.

While there, we took a black cab tour of the sectarian neighborhoods to learn more about the political history of the region.  Our driver, Bobby, showed us several murals, some more recent than others, and the 5 km long, 11 m high peace wall, which still divides the Catholic neighborhoods from the Protestant ones and helps to ensure that no small incident sparks a renewed escalation of tensions.

I often think about religion's place in world history, and how much strife it seems to have caused.  But I'm not convinced that blaming religion is the answer.  Granted, religion represents a powerful aspect of life over which to disagree, but The Troubles in Ireland were as much about nationalism as they were faith.  People, particularly when confronted with intolerant leaders, are remarkably good at finding reasons to dislike others for their differences.  It is important, then, that we constantly work to control the darker sides of our human nature and embrace the things that bring us together, rather than tear us apart.  Things like... Guinness.

We did lots of sampling of Guinness in a wide variety of friendly pubs, warm with richly colored wood and occasional live music.  Before leaving Belfast, we rented a car and drove (again, on the wrong side of the road) around the northern Antrim Coast, viewing small towns, nature, a castle, a scary rope bridge, and lots of spray painted sheep.  In Dublin, we hit most of the main tourist destinations and did a lot of walking, as evidenced by my still-achy legs.

Maybe my favorite thing about the trip, though, was the time spent with good friends.  I really do enjoy traveling alone, especially for the chance to set my own pace and take photos without holding anyone up.  But there is nothing better than cherishing the company of people you like - gathered around a comfy pub table, crammed into a small European rental car, hiking over rolling green hills - together laughing and exploring the wonders of an unfamiliar place.