Northward from Barbary Coast

Perhaps they had already been corrupted.-- a contributor to New York Magazine on the Taliban, 18 years ago, give or take.

What I haven't dwelt on very successfully, in relation to how I utilized Omar Mateen's autonomic act of terror , unlike Linda Sarsour in Aurora, interestingly enough, is my own level of complicity, and I am not sure I can resolve that, no matter how direct and on point I am. For my internalized dynamics, there is relatively little harm in that; for the country at large, this may be another matter, and with or without Donald Trump, the American left will one day have an uneasy reckoning, its ideology a series of contradictions, such that conservatives may weaken, but will always have grounds on which to reemerge.

Literature and movies, featured video of poverty stricken concrete sublets, never really assisted me in the comprehension of modern Afghan and Pakistani tribalism, and I have always been of two mindsets: civilization is better off without the Pashtun, and the Pashtun have survival skills which are useful in the event of a mass extinction, and if I want boundaries, these tribes have them in spades. They also bred into Sicilian and Roman bloodlines, as Rome evolved into the Byzantine, hence many Italians have Arabic trace elements in their provincialism, which is obviously digressing. It is easier to turn on the World Series, resign oneself to the dominance of the Dodgers, than dwell on these moral dilemmas and latent hostility toward those that challenge gender, defy the reality of biology itself, and at the same time tremble at savages who more rightly belong in Ashoka's era . There is no question that Mateen's shooting gallery was and is beyond comprehension. To make a primitive analogy, if I rolled into a room of 1500 case managers and took out 75 of them as targets, it wouldn't send any kind of message about radical obstetrics and quality of life. It is an indiscriminate behavior which actually makes it more difficult to close ranks against hedonism. Andrew Sullivan's solution to that was an appropriation, gay marriage. It won't settle the question anymore than the incautious utterances of Pope Francis, a weak leader who one day 18 months ago made me squeal in private exuberance when he liked my response, and then me weep in rare excess, a grave sin committed in my disrespect, as the atheist in me scuttles under the bed. Any Catholic reading this would scold me not to disavow my faith simply to be a smartass. He would be a better leader if he harvested such teachings gleaned from centuries, as opposed to diluting doctrine to appease the left, and if we're tone deaf, perhaps we have to be, and not out of selfishness.

Some of you may believe I am walking myself back from sometimes explosive vitriol because my father, and particularly Mainline Medical, run by my uncle, destroyed my independence at the request of the Negro Public Housing Alliance, and if I read this anonymous portion of my audience correctly, you're right, but I haven't altered in a certain sense of hardened conviction, only that Mateen was nonsensical, counterproductive, and he may have killed people who might have rejected the excesses of the sexual revolution. I have known many in the gay community, and just because my contempt with two of them led me to a temper, it doesn't mean I regale bloodbaths. But this doesn't mean national conscience is settled with the affair.