The T-Shirt Threat

With increasing frequency, events are occurring that will cause people decades from now to shake their heads and ask themselves "what were they thinking?" Some of these events are major and some go almost unnoticed, but collectively they indicate a spreading mass psychosis. I posted about this one last week. Here's the latest:

An Iraqi architect on Tuesday said he was forced to change his t-shirt before boarding a flight in New York because the shirt had "We will not be silent" written on it in Arabic and English.

Raed Jarrar wrote on his Internet blog (http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com) that he was required to change out of the shirt prior to boarding a JetBlue flight from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport to California this month because officials told him people were offended by the shirt.

In an interview with New York Public Radio on Tuesday, Jarrar said, "I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen. But I'm shocked that they happened to me here, in the U.S."

Read Jarrar's full account of the incident on his blog here. Be sure to take a look at the photos of the t-shirt that terrified his fellow passengers.

Real leaders recognize their responsibility to temper the public's tendency to go off the rails every so often (and yes, that responsibility dovetails nicely with conservatism). Cynical, incompetent, and desperate leaders encourage that tendency and leverage it. For me, this is the root of Bush's failure as a leader, and it's why I have contempt for him. One word sums up that failure perfectly: "Islamofascist." Here's a short dissection of that word with which I basically agree.

As anyone with a sense of history knows, these periodic episodes of mass psychosis repeat every few generations here and, as Europe proved in the previous century, in other countries as well. (If you haven't read Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, it's worth checking out.) The real question is how much damage we'll do to ourselves -- and in our current state, to others -- before it ends.