There Is No Cat - The Looking Glass War

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Wednesday, January 15, 2003

The Looking Glass War

When I was young and impressionable and gobbled up spy novels like they were candy, John Le Carre was one of my favorite writers. I still think he's a heck of a writer, and his books are just about the only ones that I read at that time that I can still read today. So it was interesting to see him turn his pen to the direction of The Current Situation. Unlike the comparisons to Nazi Germany I thought were somewhat overblown, I think Le Carre gets it exactly right when he compares things now to previous fevers in America itself, such as McCarthyism and other assorted red scares. He thinks this is like that, only more so. I would disagree with his assessment of the feeling among the American population. Okay, maybe half of us do think that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center. I find it hard to believe that 88% of us are in favor of war on Iraq. I hear people talking about war all the time. Even the people I know who are in favor of it are kind of queasy about it. I think we are having the debate; I just don't think it's reflected in the constant drumbeat from the press. Le Carre paints a devastating portrait of Bush. The interesting thing is that he does so in The Times of London, a Tory paper, not noted for its liberal tendencies. I suppose maybe that has something to do with Le Carre's none-too-flattering portrait of Tony Blair. Anyway, it's not The Honourable Schoolboy or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but it's an interesting read. (Found via Doc Searls.)

Posted at 10:19 PM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio