SOY COBARDE: This New York Times op-ed piece by one Javier Marias is one of the most disgusting pieces of contemptible, decadent, and gutless slop I have ever read. That the Times would give this cretin space to pronounce such views on the anniversary of the greatest mass slaughter of civilians in American history leads me to think that there is probably more than one person on the op-ed staff that agrees with the man's outlook. Senor Marias may want to treat terrorism as one of life's more annoying but inevitable disturbances and go back to eating tapas and drinking sangria without a care in the world, but I am not. This may mean that I am just a simple naive and unnuanced American, unaccustomed to the greater worldly wisdom of Europeans, but I am reminded of a story I read years ago about a lynching in a Western frontier town. A gunman shot down a man in a saloon; the local townspeople grabbed the killer and strung him up from the nearest building. The next day the local newspaper wrote that while many people might disapprove of the townspeople's impromptu justice, the newspaper did not. We have not yet reached that heightened level of civilization, the newspaper wrote, where honest citizens are prepared to permit assassins to walk our streets unmolested. As for Senor Marias, John Stuart Mill summed up what I think of him and his ilk:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."