Comments on: Mohammed Atta’s Eyes

By: anonymess

anonymess — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

testing

By: open365dayz

open365dayz — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

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By: Dymphna

Dymphna — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Every woman ought to read Gavin de Becker's book, mentioned above. I wrote about it on my blog:

The Gift of Fear.

I've given this book to many young women -- our culture trains out their intuition so that they learn to be "nice" and predators know how to turn that against them. It's chilling to read the scenario.

de Becker is amazing.

Annie Jacobsen's book is a small piece of that, too.

And I agree with your commenter about the deadness in many adolescents. It's worrying -- no wonder the suicide rate is increasing. These kids are so kewl they're frozen...

Btw, Neo, did you ever read Atta's will? No women were permitted to touch his body when preparing it for burial. Obviously he wrote it before he planned on 9/11?

By: pb

pb — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Interesting, too, that those changeling stories usually include some family trauma (death, abandonment) contemporaneous with the birth/switch. It makes me wonder how much those stories owe to abused children the tellers have known.

By: jj mollo

jj mollo — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Gavin De Becker said in his book the “Gift of Fear” some years ago that we need to pay more attention to our instincts. It is very civilized to talk ourselves out of our negative reactions to other people, but usually relatively low-cost to prevent a negative possibility. The screener could have come up with something to delay these people if he had wanted to. Hindsight is 20/20, but going forward we need to think about this very seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0440226198/104-2035143-5889517?v=glance

By: Simon Kenton

Simon Kenton — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

It goes back into those strange, folkish tales that educated bloggers don’t much encounter, and haven’t the mental/emotional equipment to grok. Here is one, from a maintenance man I went to law enforcement school with:

“You got to melt ‘em down. For true. Once a gun tastes blood, it’ll just keep seekin’ to draw it again, ‘n’ all you kin do about it is melt it. It won’t never give up trying to spill more blood, ’til you do.” Surrounded by a batch of educated incredulity, he would not be shaken. Let once a gun taste blood, and that’s it. He knew it, and it was we who were blinded against the truth by all our learning.

Well, sometimes a woman will reject her baby as an energumen, a demon-spawn, what have you. I’m uncomfortable with the concept. But she knows this one is evil, she knows it, just as she knew her other kids were fine. With all the letters after my name, I know this to be poppycock. Sort of. Because I’ve looked into drained eyes too, and been very glad to be armed and competent.

In the natural world, the closest I’ve seen to it is looking into the eyes of a peregrine falcon. It is not evil you see there, not even flat affect; they are much interested in the world around them. It’s just a kind of pure, condensed essence of death.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

This is something I have thought of often, but never mentioned for fear of sounding looney- I have raised two children and have one left at home, and have noticed the flat, dead, shark-like eyes of many of their peers. These kids are lacking something… souls? humanity? concience? I don’t know what it is, but I know it is becoming more prevalent. And I fear for our future as a society.

By: M.J.

M.J. — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

It also brings to mind the notion of zombies, as well as more modern stories that seem to have struck a nerve with the public and have been made in several versions (e.g. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”).