Able was I ‘ere I cried Uncle

Melanie Phillips wraps up the vestiges of a formerly coherent and thoughtful culture that used to have some depth, while over at the Guardian’s web of froth, between the 1000th spitting allegation of “poodlism” and warning us of the evils of religion which they typically characterize all of it being fundamentalism (but only if you’re Christian or Hindu), we find a self-obsessed aging child compelled with new-age stagnancy trying to impose religion as a solution to the world’s problems:

The power of forgetting
The Daoist ideal of 'sitting quietly' could help us break the cycle of escalating violence
Karen Armstrong

Je t’enmerde pas, dear reader.

We cannot all be poets and mystics, but we now face unprecedented dangers, and need to be creative as never before. This means that we must "forget" old ideas that cannot speak to our present situation. The policies of the cold war, which was between nations and empires, cannot be effective when the enemy is within. An American rabbi told me that, in his view, the ideal response to the atrocities of September 11 would have been for the US president to declare a traditional 40-day period of mourning and to do nothing until the horrifying new reality had been fully accepted and understood.

I think by ‘understood’ she means ‘passively resigned to’, but that’s beside the point. The notion of a larger society's welfare is meaningless to someone so obsessed with their own feelings, taking up a faith so out of line with ones' own culture, that any concoction would do just as well.

Among the comments to her fine opus there is indeed proof that the British left without a point of reference or forthought will apply their usual angry nonsense to any averse situation. They are amok:

Rowthorn - August 19, 2006 03:12 PM:

Didn't the Taliban blow up some giant Buddha's that had been sitting very quietly for many hundred years.

Leapyear - August 19, 2006 03:33 PM:
Yes, statues were blown up. This did not lead to escalating violence.

September 11th was not an escalation of violence. How could that be? After all Bush let it happen um... planned it um... caused it um... used remote control Boeings um... well something. Either way it has to be the fault of the projection of the average Guardian readers’ mind, surely.

Getting back to Phillips' piece we can note the irony of this act of ‘not being still’ and one cannot help but wonder not what’s going through the perpetrators’ minds, but through Armstrong’s.

But the argument that foreign policy is the cause of the threat to Britain — a claim trotted out by a wide spectrum of people — is itself idiotic beyond measure. As Reid said, there was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.

Whole ‘lotta meditation going on, yes?

What Karen Armstrong IS displaying is the beginning of awareness, but absent the ability to comprehend the notion that something must be realistically done with an evil which cannot be reasoned with, she resorts to the very limited tools available to her: adequately assuaging her own fear, which is also all about her, and not about the problem and effects of terror. The option left to her with such a limited understanding of human nature is to find a line of reason to hide behind – something useless in the meatspace of the physical world.

The fuse is lit!