This morning, September 4^th, 2001, began on a sour note.There was a fax waiting when I came into the office listing 23 Islamic terrorist organizations we are banned from peddling title insurance to.Not only do I need to change arrangements for that Allah Bismallah Jihad Death Squad Commercial Properties, Inc. closing over in Pender County this afternoon, but having seen the phrase, “frozen assets,” first thing in the morning, I’ll now be thinking of a certain former fiancée all day.

Looking up from the keyboard and out the window as I type these lines, I can see 75 … dwarves? …Reindeer? …Millimeters? …Guitar pickers in Nashville? …Actually, none of these traditionally numerical collections pass before my baby browns at this moment, though I’d prefer any of them except the C & W strummer boys to the loathsome panorama across the street from my office at this moment.Right now, to the southeast, there are 75 attorneys, paralegals and New Hanover County functionaries sprawled on the Thalian Hall lawn talking on their cell phones.They are doing this, not because a title insurance company is hosting a picnic for the local legal profession, but because another goddam bomb threat has been called into the County courthouse across the street, and half a dozen overweight deputies have chased them out of the registry office and various other musty collections of documents stored there.

They haven’t gone back to their offices a block or two away in downtown office buildings or three or four blocks away in the historic district, despite the feeble cries for help issuing faintly from suffocated in-baskets.They haven’t gone to the library to improve their minds in a large, peaceful, air-conditioned room full of books and periodicals.They haven’t gone to lunch half an hour early, because no terrorist attack is going to change their red blooded American eating habits.They haven’t even gone to the other side of Thalian Hall, where that structure’s substantial, three-story walls would protect them from a bomb blast in the courthouse or flying shards of glass and brick resulting from same.They are lounging on lush green grass right across the street from a building that has been evacuated because a bomb threat has been called in, accidentally getting some sun and fresh air and intentionally narrating the tense nothing they’re experiencing to disinterested spouses and coworkers on the other end of those cell phone signals.They are symbolizing in microcosm the whole bugfuck crazy nation, heeding the siren song of the ring-tailed sonofabitching idiot.

We are, as a people, chanting “War” to the tune of a soft drink advertising jingle in a pleasant but unconvincing tenor.Flags patriotically fly from the radio masts of giant SUVs, most carrying one overweight driver and no passengers a distance that could be easily negotiated on foot or by bicycle, each putting a few shekels in the Burnoose Bank & Trust for Usama bin Laden, his cousins and/or his contributors with each fill up.

Yes, we have our flags, our white ribbons, our candles for the 10pm Wednesday backyard demonstration that’s supposed to be photographed by satellite as a show of national unity and our chicken heads on lengths of fishing line for the midnight Saturday national photo shoot that ought to really scare the shit out of the terrorists.In coming weeks, we’ll remind the world of America’s unique gift for pointless gesture in many, many other ways, as projected in this link.

Extraterrestrials monitoring American media and Internet transmissions right now would get the clear impression that the word “war” can be accurately defined as “a collection of expensively dressed old white men making televised speeches and an extra layer of gratuitous violence in e-mailed cartoons.”

Those hypothetical aliens would be as misinformed as a huge number of Americans.“War” is two civilizations trying to destroy one another.The Washington gentry that packed picnic lunches and drove their buggies out to the pastureland around Bull Run Creek in 1861 had much in common with their descendants expectantly channel-surfing over to CNN during dinner last night. They were neither more nor less clueless, neither more nor less human.Technically, they were a little less human … 796 generations from the cave as opposed to our current, proud 802.This sentence links to a separate page that examines what it feels like to be 802 generations from the cave.

“Leaving the cave,” broadly speaking, marked the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic times, and Neolithic times are the times of mankind engaging in Cultivation.Cultivation marked the beginning of conflict between settled tillers and nomadic herdsmen.This point of development was explained to most of us in simplistic, poetic terms when we were very young.It was the story of Cain and Abel, one a farmer, the other a shepherd, one preferred by God, the other a murderer.Social scientists use slightly more sophisticated shorthand for this tectonic friction between members of our species with the term, “Cow And Plow Revolution.”

A classical education teaches that those with cows war perpetually against those with plows.Further, when the “cowboys” win and settle into the lands they’ve conquered from the “plowboys,” they inevitably trade the open range for enclosed fields and pastures, take up the plow themselves and get the hell beaten out of them by their still-cowboy cousins riding in from the steppes a few generations later.Most readers will vaguely remember hazy waves of Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians trampling over each other to get at the Hebrews in the Old Testament.As many or more readers, grafting high school history on top of elementary school Sunday school, can layer Huns, various Turks and Mongols on top of Persians.Historically speaking, History is the “Cow And Plow Revolution,” and that’s too big an issue to be watching from a distance of only fifty feet the way the local legal community is doing right now.

Cell phones generally run on rechargeable batteries.When Al Qaida successfully infiltrates the oilfield crews in Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia (which might realistically take them until around February, 1968) and blows all that shit up, the juice is going to quit flowing from the wall thingy into those batteries.It’s going to quit flowing into those SUVs, too, not to mention the microwaves that are feeding all those paunches crushing the lawn across the street as I write this, the satellite dish CNN’s coming into at home this evening and the TV that’s its final intended destination. 

The flow of American blood will rise in inverse proportion to the flow of Arab oil, and then the real definition of “war” will start to dawn on us.That cute Dr. Seuss parody poem about the “Us down in Uville” that was all over the Net 9/13/01 will be replaced by something more akin to Colonel McRae’s observation that “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row, /That mark our place; and in the sky / The larks, still bravely singing, fly / Scarce heard amid the guns below

“We are the dead.Short days ago / we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved, and now we lie / In Flanders fields.”

I want us to make war on terrorism.I am confident that the settled people have the best possible chance of successfully pursuing a final conflict against the nomads right now.I think that enough centuries have passed to firmly establish that civilization (root word “civitas,” “city”) can’t convert 100 percent of the nomads.Goddam, it’s not as if bin Laden couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan instead of a desert hideout if he wanted to, you know.We’ve offered them Barcaloungers, Budweiser and Seinfeld in syndication, and it hasn’t lifted their robes one damn bit, though I notice that they’re not turning down the $.29 a day I'm sending their niece.

In a more perfect world, we could just air drop a lot of hair spray, make up and video cameras all over the Afghan hills, and a couple of weeks later Al Qaida (how can we be losing a war to people who don’t know enough to follow “q” with “u?”) would start acting like Christian religious fanatics instead of their Islamic equivalents, annoying us, soliciting donations on Sunday morning TV and ruining cocktail parties, but not carrying AK-47s and vials of anthrax.However, we can no more count on Western beneficences such as these mellowing out the terrorists than we can count on Anal Roberts & Company to hijack a Saudi Air passenger jet and crashing it into the Mosque of the Ka’abah in Mecca. We can only hope the terrorists try to use relatively high tech anthrax instead of just jimmying open the windows of all the goddam daycare facilities over the weekend, which would make us all sick as hell. I am convinced that modern disease spontaneously generates from large congregations of children, but I guess that's another issue.

Despite my best efforts, I have to honestly admit to prejudice against Arabs dating back to diapered memories of World War II vets recounting problems with Bedouin despoilers of the dead and wounded after the Battle of Kasserine Pass in ’43.T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, on which the Lawrence of Arabia film was later based, generated further distaste for Arabs with its vivid reminiscences of the camel theft stimulated adrenalin high and sodomy-based camaraderie that existed among (future Jordanian King)  Hussein’s guerrilla fighters on the Hejaz front during the First World War.  I have tried to find kindly, gentle facets to the Moslem faith and reminded myself and others that Mohammed himself loved cats, but the kindly, gentle features of Islam are a tough sell.

I am also convinced that Israel has far and away the best right to nationhood of any country on Earth.Between the Old Testament, the purchase of much of the land during Ottoman and Mandate times and conclusive victories in ’49, ’56 and ’67, the Jews have paid for that land with every available currency from baksheesh to blood.Yes, a percentage of today’s Palestinians are actual refugees from the State of Israel, where they would be subject to the risks minorities face at the hands of their fellow men in every State, but I think it is safe to assume that these risks would be considerably lessened by the Israelis’ obvious ability to empathize with minorities.

More importantly, most of today’s Palestinians are the grandchildren of the fedayheen gutter scum who swarmed to Palestine in ’49 looking forward to raping, pillaging and murdering Jewish settlers upon British withdrawal from their former League of Nations Mandate.At the end of that conflict, surprised at their defeat but cheerfully making the best of things, the governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the other Arab nations cut down on their inner city crime problems by simply not allowing the criminals they’d shipped to Palestine to kill Jews back into their native lands.That’s how most of the poor, downtrodden Palestinians got to an area the Israelis would happily leave them and their descendants alone in if they’d quit blowing up busloads of schoolchildren, stabbing farmers in their beds and firing rockets at hospitals every few days.Though I have tried to rise above these feelings, I dislike these people and anything that reminds me of them.A mental inventory of the desert with which they are associated is probably what ruined my attempt to write a beach music song a few years ago … “I’ve got sand in my urethra / Up my nose and between my teethra / Wow wow, ooh wah wah wah ooh …”

This will be a real war, not a video game or Wolf Blitzer special report to be watched on a big screen TV with the AC cranked way, way down.It is going to cause discomfort, and more of it will be fought on American soil.Classically schooled historians determine the advantages of the two opposed factions in the “Cow And Plow Revolution” by looking at a map and determining the true boundaries between Europe and Asia.In the eyes of that school of thought, Alexander the Great pushed those boundaries back to the Hindu Kush and, 19 centuries later, during the siege of Vienna, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent pushed them in the other direction to the gates of Vienna.

In these terms, at the time of this writing, the border between the nomads’ steppe homeland and civilization is in midtown Manhattan and suburban Northern Virginia.That’s a dramatically frightening perspective coming from an archaic subset of a dry social science.However, classically trained historians aren’t the only ones achieving drama and fear from today’s headlines.Look again at the sentiments of that 20-something A-10 pilot.

For a radically separate but equally poignant perspective, let me share advice I received last night.My mother, remembering World War II rationing policies, cautioned me to stock up on rubber products and lard.Certainly, in the period between the Japanese capture of the Dutch Malaysian rubber plantations and the perfection of synthetic rubber production, in the Deep South where frying was the preferred method of preparation for almost all foods, her advice was sound.Living as I do in the autumn of 2001, I can skip the lard entirely and get by with a spare bicycle inner tube and fresh patch kit or two, but there are other items that are not available at all.

If Arab oil supplies are sabotaged or otherwise interrupted, cooking will be difficult, heating damn near impossible and cooling a pleasant memory.On a normal day, how long does an American go without relying on transportation, power or other necessities generated largely from this extremely vulnerable commodity?I don’t have a fireplace in which to burn old fashioned wood if I had a supply of wood, and everyone I know who does have a fireplace either obtains firewood with a gasoline-powered chainsaw or buys it from someone who does.We’re a soft civilization highly dependent on people who are either the enemy or the enemy’s cousin, winter’s coming on, and Americans can't handle the hardships inherent in stiff bristle toothbrushes anymore.

What about days that aren’t so normal?Let’s leave the realm of getting the air touching our skin from 55 to 70 degrees without a sweater.Let’s think about something more crucial than the CD player, computer and cable TV.Imagine the last doctor’s office you were in, outside of the Edward Jenner Museum down in Georgia.Now imagine it without any electronic tools and list the services and diagnoses you could still obtain there.Now imagine pitting that denuded doctor’s office and empty toolbox against serious biological and chemical warfare.See why I’m urging my friends and family to be extra conscientious about taking vitamins and eating healthy meals these days?

The battlefield in this war may be a few blocks away on Medical Center Drive.It’s on aisle 14 in the grocery store when there’s one loaf of bread left on the shelf and five frightened families reaching for it at the same time.It may be at the Food Lion checkout counter a few minutes later when the shopper who grabbed that bread successfully pulls out a food stamp card to pay for it and the other four families, all of whom support themselves in the workplace, go beyond grumbling.Quelled and quieted there, it may be in the Food Lion parking lot, where ten families who’ve lost workplace sufficiency due to recession fueled by fuel shortage but haven’t qualified for government assistance because those programs have been cut in order to fund the military wait to wrestle carts or bags away from shoppers when and if possible, or on the road halfway between Food Lion and your mother’s or sister’s home when a vanload of hungry desperadoes pulls up in the next lane at a stoplight.

Right now, it’s just the comic opera goofiness of the legal community in this small Southern town kinda thinking and hoping that they’re important enough to be targeted over there at the courthouse, but not really believing it enough to get out of the way of real danger.In a few months, it can be by far the ugliest nightmare anyone has ever imagined for this country.That’s why the only thing most of us know to do is hope that somebody knows how to fight this new kind of war before we go through those months to that nightmare.

We tell one another and ourselves that President Bush has turned into Clauswitz, Clemenceau, Churchill and Patton rolled into one overnight.I sincerely believe the man is handling matters like someone who’s earned a graduate level business degree from a good school, dotting every “I,” crossing every “t,” planning and calculating every move out with infinite care and attention to detail, and I sincerely believe that good American business schools turn out advanced degree graduates who can formulate and execute effective, successful plans.

I know it’s a new kind of war.I know we can crush him if we can catch him, and that we have to be patient; that it’s going to take some time to catch him, and that during that time, people are going to be damn fools on adrenalin across the street on the Thalian Hall lawn instead of just being anonymous, relatively passive damn fools inside the courthouse.

…But I’d still like to wake up tomorrow and see American planes bombing the hell out of something …