Eating is sort of a basic self defense mechanism. Somewhat related , my wife is much, much less of an internet junkie than me, but she sometimes reads and participates in a couple food related NYT online forums. There's this nut, lives in NY, bikes 2 hrs a day, 2 % body fat, eats nothing but rice and lentils or something like that. He's always blaming all the world's ills on fat people, and he found an angle in this one too. It's all quite bizarre.
On a somewhat more literary plain, did you see the online NYT magazine special? It wasn't in yesterday's print edition, not the national one anyway, I think it's supposed to be next week's edition. nytimes.com . I haven't read much, but it looks really good. I don't know about you, but I think X likes Robert Stone, and I've been a fan since "Dog Soldiers". His piece is at nytimes.com .
The expressions from Washington are nothing surprising — assurances of ‘‘resolve’’ and retribution. But in various ways, our internal narrative, our social and political foundations, circumscribe our capacity for revenge. The internal narrative of our enemies, their absolute ruthless devotion to an invisible world, makes them strong. Our system, too, is a state of mind. We need to find in it the elements that will serve our actual survival.
The power of narrative is shattering, overwhelming. We are the stories we believe; we are who we believe we are. All the reasoning of the world cannot set us free from our mythic systems. We live and die by them. |
