The New York Times is an institution that attracts careerists, who are drawn to power and access. This gave me a kind of a free hand. The kind of work that I wanted to do, most of the other reporters didn't want to do. I was not doing lunch. I was not sucking up to officials. I was writing from the street.

In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.

Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.

War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.

The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.