Reporting correspondant spastique pour le service

"Why can't man be as free to dance in the sunlight in the time that he has?"-- Thomas Gibson

When nine eleven hit, I was here, same desk, asking my fellow writers in Speakeasy if they were okay, before my account was banned a year later. Happily, I haven't been banned from commenting at The Washington Post. I do not personalize disagreements with Eugene Robinson or Jonathan Capehart, haven't worn out my welcome, and in 2001, I was vainly attempting to hold onto my belief in independent living rhetoric. September 11 was surreal. More or less a source of dissonance, even with the knowledge that the Twin Towers was a tourist treat when I lived in Rusk Institute. Fourteen years ago it was simply shock, too much video of debris and passenger jets, and the literature of Islamic radicalism amounted to little more than the standing ovation  President Bush received before a joint session of Congress uttering the name of "al qaeda". Everything is big in the US. Big disasters, epic wars, sometimes too lengthy, blockbuster futurist parables about the dark side of perfection which do little more than announce we're already here. These days, anyone who pays attention to foreign correspondents can whip up a pate of the failure of civilization for Arabian-Semitic non-Jewish peoples.

The Paris attacks have hit me profoundly, and like the handful of Americans who volunteered for de Gaulle during the Resistance, I want to apply for a Visa and trot off to France in a fervor of retrenchment, petite ailing almost life long welfare mongrel, not quite at James Cromwell's level of horrific deterioration in Surrogates. Interesting premise, stupid movie. Even I realize we aren't turning back from this evolution to integrated cyborgs.

My sister wants me to be careful with my level of provocation, and surely, if I was confronted with ISIS, I'd fare worse than Kayla Mueller, but I cannot sit here and watch European heritage collapse and fall to its knees as an apologia for thousands of years of imperial strife. This is where I am right now.