>[Hair continues to sprout, unbecomingly, on leftist chests. From NY
>Observer, "Left Falls Apart as Center Holds":]
>
>For Doug Henwood, a WBAI radio host who wrote the scathingly
>anti-capitalist Wall Street, one of the best-selling leftist books
>of the decade, and who called the Gulf War and the bombing in Kosovo
>"American imperial manipulations," the question [about how to
>respond to the Sept.11 attack] is a no-brainer. "This is an attack
>on us," he said. "There is a near-certainty that something will be
>done again soon. Clearly, considerable use of force will have to be
>used to capture these motherfuckers."
Letter written to NYO:
>As flattering as it is to be quoted in your paper - and by Rick
>Perlstein, whose work I've admired in the past - I did not suggest
>to him that the question of September 11 was a "no-brainer." I told
>him that I thought it was incredibly complicated, and that I'd spent
>a couple of weeks trying to write about it precisely because it was
>so complicated. It is devilishly hard to combine an acknowledgment
>of the role of U.S. policy in creating the conditions in which
>terrorists can arise with a sense that justice requires the
>perpetrators be punished and future acts of mass murder prevented.
>That prevention has to include some type of police action in
>response, but also longer-term alterations of U.S. policy. Thinking
>this though will require holding lots of thoughts in mind all at
>once - a task that will require lots of brains, a commodity that
>seems in woefully short supply at the moment.