Against the Wind

If I followed that dictum, I’d post nothing at all, because I am my own harshest critic. Blogging kind of gets me past the critic to do some writing… almost.

It’s a truism that small minds discuss people, larger minds chew on events and places, but the big guys deal in ideas.

Here’s the WSJ take on the assassination in Yemen. There’s a great short story, film or novel in this murder. It’s developing, and fascinating.

It was a little after 9 p.m. when a Palestine Liberation Organization official stepped out of the elevator into the lobby of Paris’s Le Meridien Montparnasse, a modern luxury hotel that caters to businessmen and well-heeled tourists. The PLO official was going to dinner with a friend, who was waiting by the front desk. As they pushed out the Meridien’s front door, they both noticed a man on a divan looking intently at them. It was odd enough that at dinner they called a contact in the French police. The policeman advised the PLO official to go directly back to the hotel after dinner and stay put. The police would look into it in the morning.

When the PLO official and his friend came back from dinner, the man on the divan was gone, and the Meridien’s lobby was full of Japanese tourists having coffee after a night on the town. From here the accounts differ; in one version, a taxi blocked off traffic at the end of the street that runs in front of the Meridien, apparently to hold up any police car on routine patrol. In another, the traffic on the street was light.

What is certain is that as soon as the PLO official stepped out of the passenger side of the car, two athletic men in track suits came walking down the street, fast. One of them had what looked like a gym bag. When the friend of the PLO official got out of the car to say goodbye, he noticed the two but didn’t think much of it. They looked French, but other than that it was too dark to see more.

One of the men abruptly lunged at the PLO official, pinning him down on the hood of the car. According to the PLO official’s friend, one of the men put his gym bag against the head of the PLO official and fired two quick rounds into the base of his neck, killing him instantly. There was a silencer on the weapon. The two fled down the street and disappeared into an underground garage, never to be seen again.

That was 1992. And the world of assassins has changed a lot in the intervening years.

Is that enough of a tease? This is quite a story.

The blogress here is clearly not among the sharpest knives in the drawer, so though I enjoy ideas, I’d be better off if I didn’t try to write about them. Great preamble there, no?

Dr. Sanity has connected some dots. She posits that the political left is most interested in a raw power play to get the current health care reform passed. But more than simple punditry, she claims that the fundamental difference between the liberal mind and the conservative is how they view humanity. Yeah buddy! That’s just up my alley. I truly believe its fundamentally a difference of our sets of assumptions. And if the good Dr has it right, then it’s clear (if not to you, then at least to me) that the conservatives are dealing from a better understanding of human nature and a better reading of history and the meaning of our place in it.

As for me, as for now, I’m low on sleep, and high on an irrational desire to go filler up with a fridge run. So I’ll post a pic and head to bed.

OH, bother. The photo of the heron is hiding somewhere, as is my photo processing on the simple software. I don’t care to go digging through programs to find it. GN.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.