I'm staying very near Mojave this summer and am endlessly fascinated by the airport/junkyard, so Patrick's column was nicely timed. Driving past the airfield yesterday, I found myself across a chicken-wire fence from the intact-looking Convair 880. That was a thrill; unless I'm mistaken, the 880/980 was the fastest production commercial airliner (except for Concorde, of course), cruising at well over 600 mph. (Fittingly, it's parked beside two sorry-looking F/A-111 hulks.) What surprised me was the size of the Convair: no bigger than a 737-800, albeit with four engines. The original Boeing 707 (the Dash-80), now parked near Seattle, also looks quite small, although it's generally considered the first commercial "big jet" and caused quite a stir when Tex Johnson, Boeing's famous test pilot, barrel-rolled it over Lake Washington during a demonstration flight. Goes to show how our perspective on what constitutes a big plane underwent a quantum change when the 747 came along.

Hmm. Her family must be Indian.

Yes, let's celebrate a racist for being...what exactly? A woman? Good-looking? Having famous lovers that she didn't enjoy screwing?

As any self-proclaimed egghead ought to know, it's not very bright (or justifiable) to claim that you know "what Arabs think" or "what Israelis are like," and to love or despise either on that basis. Generalizations like "Arabs hate women," "Israelis are clean," and "we (meaning, presumably, white Americans) are uniquely Enlightened and freedom-loving"), ignore the sheer diversity of belief and practice that exist within all large cultures.

Moreover, cultural phenomena such as religious conservatism are not timeless or essential. In all settings, Arab as well as European, they emerge and disappear in response to changing historical conditions (such as colonization, foreign occupation, being described as subhuman, and political turmoil). The only Arabs who want to kill you for your short skirts and your fooling around are the ones who think just like you, and there are fewer of those than you imagine. Most Arabs don't really care about your skirts - they're too busy living their own lives or being bombed by the "clean."

Uh, isn't the Dash-80 (the Boeing 707 prototype) now based at Boeing's museum in Everett? I recall seeing it there in the late 1990s. The Smithsonian had it for eighteen years in the 70s and 80s before the plane returned to Washington state. Has it gone back to Virginia?

Hmm. If you say so, Bill.

Achmed

PS: Muhammad was a businessman, not a "warlord." And "the Muslims" don't share a scripturally mandated agenda of murder, torture or conquest anymore than "the Jews," "the Christians" or even "the Americans" do. Large, complex religions function on the basis of multiple (and often conflicting) scriptures, interpretations and agendas, which shift with time, place and other variables. This Golden Boy character desperately needs to go to college, and I don't mean Bob Jones University.

When Bill Maher says that distancing ourselves from Bush would keep us safe, he probably means distancing ourselves not just from the man, but from what he represents: aggressive unilateralism in foreign policy, Guantanamo, blank check and blind eye to Israel, thypocritical support for friendly dictators, assorted oil grabs, insufferable arrogance and self-righteousness, and casual abuse of the English language (especially words like "freedom" and "torture"). In other words, the legacy of history. If we can distance ourselves from these things, we probably would be safer. Then again, perhaps I presume too much, and Bill did mean GW alone is the problem, in which case Bill is wrong and Golden Boy is sort of right.

If Golden Boy is using Wikipedia as his major source of information on Islam (as opposed to, say, Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, which would be better still), it might explain his stunning erudition. GB, just for starters, please look up a basic biography of Muhammad, which will tell you that he was - gasp! - a businessman at the time that he had his revelation. It's only afterwards that he became a political and military leader. It is, of course, reasonable to see connections between religious and political agendas (our own society is a perfect example) and there's no doubt that early Islam was explicitly both a religious and a political project. But to claim that Muhammad "invented" Islam as an excuse for his military and political activities is asinine. Successful religions don't work that way.

Finally, I agree with you that Islam is not quite a "religion of peace" - that claim is made frequently these days because large numbers of Muslims feel defensive about the violence that's perpetrated in the name of their religion. Then again, it's just as moronic to claim that Islam is a "religion of conquest and conversion." If that were true, there would be no Hindus left in India after several centuries of rule by Muslim kings, and no Jews would have survived in Spain or the Ottoman empire. Bear in mind that it was the Catholics, not the Moors, that expelled Jews from Spain. Islamic texts and traditions (again, these are MULTIPLE) contain prescriptions for peace as well as war, coexistence as well as conversion - not unlike Christianity, incidentally. Now please, lay off the Wikipedia.