We the Paranoid:WashPost,Dec.4,2007

Eugene Robinson wrote:" We Americans like to think of ourselves as strong, rugged and supremely confident - a nation of Marlboro Men and Marlboro Women, minus the cigarettes and the lung cancer. Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University and Catherine Besteman of Colge College, had co-edited a book called "Why America's Top Pundits(with authority) Are Wrong." "The Insecure American" turned out to be a revelation - by turns alarming, depressing and laugh-out-loud amusing - as scholar after scholar presented research showing just how unnerved this society is. Catherine Lutz of Brown Uniersity reported on her studies of what IKE called the "military-industrial complex." She noted that the immense resources devotes to war-making are based on assumptions that anthropologists might not accept as given - that war is embedded in human nature, and therefore can never be consigned to our barbarian past, as was done with slavery. To recap: We're afraid of one another, we're afraid of the rest of the world, we'are afraid of getting sick, we're afraid of dying. Maybe if we study our insecurites and confront them, we'll learn to keep them in check. My comment: Faith,hope and charity would be the motto for living in this mundane world. Francis Shieh a.k.a. Xie Shihao. December 5, 2007 at 6 a.m.