Here's a point that may bewilder foreigners about American inactivism. In most parts of the world, big, angry public demonstrations are a traditional way of responding to provocations. We have grown accustomed to seeing "the Arab street," for example, staging big rallies with banners and burning effegies and the like. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., there was remarkably little of that even after September 11 - a bunch of memorials and prayer services and bumper stickers and hanging flags, but Americans were remarkably united in their disinterest in carrying "death to bin Laden" placards, let alone stringing up the first Muslim they could lay hands on. Terrorists blew up my office, and I spent more time over the next week on conference calls than demonstrating in the street.

As a result, I suspect that the rest of the world tends to underestimate the depth of rage that still simmers here, seeing as most of us have just gone back to our jobs and families, and in November a lot of Americans won't even bother to vote. Part of that, of course, is the supreme confidence of the American people from Day 1 that our military would find whoever did this, wherever they were in the world, and kick their ass. But it's also a matter of most Americans feeling like it's not worth the effort to take time away from their own lives to make a stink about something, even something really, really big. And that is, for the most part, a healthy instinct. But people who think it will translate into Americans wanting nothing done about a problem that DOES demand a solution are invariably in for an ugly surprise.

PJ O'Rourke? Please. This stealthy movement started with Sam Johnson --it's just taken this long to pick up momentum for some reason. I had meant to get this to you sooner, but, well, you know...

"Idleness predominates in many lives where it is not suspected; for, being a vice which terminates in itself, it may be enjoyed without injury to others; and it is therefore not watched like fraud, which endangers property; or like pride, which naturally seeks its gratifications in another's inferiority. Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore nobody is busy to censure or detect it.... Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought."
Johnson: Idler #31 (November 18, 1752)

I like your columns that deal with the wisdom of doing nothing. Instead of being referred to as a "columnist", you should adopt the title "inactivist." You could lead a grass-roots movement toward your way thinkng and be the first "inactivist activist."

I suppose that my ill-defined hostility to Warren Christopher is grounded in my very brief service some fifteen years ago as a speechwriter for him and his patron Cyrus Vance. Having observed the horrors of Democratic policymaking up close, I was allowed on this occasion to watch Christopher at some distance, both spiritual and physical. At first glance, he appears to be a character in one of those low-budget cartoons of the 1960s -- "Clutch Cargo," for instance -- where the figures are inert but the eyes and lips move. At second glance, he has the look of an Indian on exhibit at the Smithsonian: Chief Warren, of the now-extinct Christopher tribe, who was brought to the capital in 1910 to be examined but died in the harsh winter of 1911, was embalmed, and whose brown, waxy, deeply-lined countenance (clothed in western garb) now stares out at visitors in the final month before he is moved off display and buried with dignity in his ancestral
lands.