Sunday’s N.Y. Times had a front-page article titled “Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By.”  This article is so naïve that it makes me want to cancel my subscription.  I suppose the true culprits are the editors who let such an affront to good journalism make it to the Times, let alone its front page.  What this article is referring to, of course, is the idea that all the uprisings across the Arab world are generated by ordinary people who have become fed up with authoritarian rule.  Al Qaeda has not been present in this process.  So far.  And that’s the problem.  What’s naïve is the foolish thought that they won’t be.

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Before Libya and their insane and murderous dictator started grabbing all the headlines, the Pakistani government’s treatment of Mr. Raymond Davis was news.  First, the media in our country lamented that the Pakistanis arrested someone with diplomatic immunity.  Second, we suddenly saw an about face when reporters discovered that Mr. Davis is really a contractor with the C.I.A.  To these mentally challenged members of the Fourth Estate, I say: so what?  Nearly every embassy and consulate of every industrialized nation maintains spies working undercover as diplomats.

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Much of human history took place after the invention of writing.  The progress from Babylonian cuneiform to the gilded manuscripts of the Middle Ages represents a span of many centuries.  Gutenberg instigated the first paradigm shift by inventing movable type and a printing press around 1439, inventions that made mass book production possible.  Up to Gutenberg’s time, book production was generally done by monks and academics, for monks and academics.  After Gutenberg, more people had access to the written word, a definite factor in the general increase in literacy over many centuries.  But there were no real paradigm shifts again until digital printing became commonplace.  Sure, color was added and multiple fonts (the medieval Book of Kells, found in Trinity College in Dublin, possesses rich colors, lavishly done by hand by Irish monks), but digital printing is now having a bigger effect than Gutenberg’s inventions.

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Just in time to detour the national debate from Arizona, the media is touting the virtues of the newly crowned Miss America Teresa Scanlan, a seventeen-year-old who looks and acts twenty-five.  From second-hand sources (I found her name with a quick google), I have learned that she is an accomplished pianist, is focused on getting a law degree, wants to be a Supreme Court judge, and looks ravishing in an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini.

It’s the last part that bothers me.  While I’m one of the first to decry the plight of women in other cultures who are treated as sex objects (we’re probably more familiar with Middle Eastern cultures, but Latin America, India, China, and Southeast Asia should be considered in our class of misogynist strongholds), is the whole Miss America, Miss Universe, and other beauty pageant nonsense not the same thing?  Yeah, I know, the bikini bit was to show how fit the women are, wink, wink.  It’s a fitness show.  Bull!  What it does is give many men and not a few women some place to aim their testosterone beyond guns and politics, just what we need to heal from Arizona.  Yeah!  God bless America!

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Like three hundred million other Americans, I was moved by the untimely and senseless death of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the Arizona shooter.  Perhaps the syrupy media attention and Mr. Obama’s moving words, which dominated his eulogy of the victims and praise for the heroes, is just what we need to pull this nation back together.  However, the rational part of me, not the emotional, tells me that this is an impossible task unless we come to some consensus based on cold logic and unemotional compromise.

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