That decoy is, of course, the veil, the abaya, the burqa, the chador, the jalabiyya, and every other possible version, extent or form of hijab that women are expected, and often forced, to wear throughout the Middle East and in some parts of Africa.

The veil is the common currency of subjection, or so the West considers it, and it is the yardstick of Muslim purity, or so the fundamentalists have conceived it. It is a pawn in the propaganda war between the major players in Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, or what Ian Buruma has dubbed the Occidentalists (those who demonize the West) and the Orientalists (those who demonize the East).

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The answer is, of course -- but where exactly should we place them on our priorities list? The case for war is stronger against Iraq. But recent remarks made by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the New York Times indicate that the U.S. might be considering moving the war on terrorism first to Indonesia and the Philippines, among other places. Those two governments, which are friendly toward the United States, would likely welcome American help in eradicating terrorist groups operating in their countries.

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Here is Edward Said writing in the Nation: "In the United States at least, there is no major segment of the polity, no significant sector of the culture, no part of the whole community capable of identifying sympathetically with the Islamic world." And here is Ali Abunimah in the New York Times: "[I wonder] why Israelis and pro-Israeli spokesmen who are called for comment by the same radio and television stations that call me are rarely asked to condemn the violence that is committed in their name."

These are familiar questions, and ones to which Pollyanna, pussyfoot diplomats like Colin Powell refuse to give straight answers, preferring instead to ignore the blatant hypocrisy they express. This is political correctness at its most insidious, because it makes us and, more important, our peace brokers, willfully blind to the great and ongoing moral lie staring them in the face.

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You see, we don't like to admit to ourselves that the expedient thing is almost always more appealing than the right thing. And since it's rare that the expedient thing and the right thing turn out to be the same thing, we tend to choose the expedient thing and then try to justify it after the fact. That's what we've been doing with abortion all along, because, well, unwanted babies are just too damned inconvenient. So we've had to find a way to kill them without feeling bad about it. And how have we done that? Simple. A fertilized egg isn't human until, umm, until we decide it is -- yeah that's it -- which may or may not be when it has a heartbeat, or brain waves, or, alas, in the case of partial-birth abortion, not until it passes the lips of the vagina and plops out onto the table for all to see. Yes, that should work nicely. Good. Done.

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But now we're dancing in its streets. It's time we shirked this gloomy posture, and stood up to claim our decidedly sure-footed victories in the supposedly unconquerable land of the now fleeing Taliban.

We've pulled off a stunning coup literally overnight, and we've done so in little more than a month of precision bombing. But, all the while, a ceaseless cacophony of negativity has been wafting from the haughtiest liberal corners of the homefront press. They just can't seem to let us enjoy our fine hour, however fleeting it may prove to be. There's always a dark side, always a catch to the small good we seem to be doing, or some hidden failure behind the Pentagon's proud dispatches.

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Not anymore. Now it seems I'm with the sticklers, the devils who revel in the details, the litigious brake-slammers every American is learning to hate. That is to say, I'm still a civil libertarian, but I'm not always so proud of it anymore. And, if we're honest with ourselves, none of us should be.

The reason is very simple. Freedom begets evil.

They didn't tell you that one in civics class, did they? It's not exactly the sentiment you feel when you're standing on the field of dreams, or in the bleachers -- as so many (including President Bush and Mayor Giuliani) were Tuesday night at Game 3 of the World Series -- listening with rapt joy to the chorus of "God Bless America" being sung by one of New York's finest on behalf of New York's bravest. It's not the visceral charge that stiffens the proverbial hairs on your neck, or the throat-lumping gratitude that jerks a few unwitting tears from your peepers. Nope. In fact, the flip side of freedom, or as Henry James might have put it, the figure buried in freedom's carpet, never even occurs to you at times like this. Probably never at all. It certainly didn't to me.

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1) Cowardly

Here is Fish: "Bill Maher, Dinesh D'Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by pointing out that 'cowardly' is not the word to describe men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in."

Indeed, it's true that during the last five weeks much has been made of one of President Bush's early remarks about the catastrophe. "Today," he said in his first address to the nation on the subject, "America was attacked by a faceless coward."

Now Fish, like so many of his fashionably iconoclastic cohorts in academe and elsewhere, along with Maher, D'Souza and Sontag, insists that "coward" is the wrong word here.

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How quaint. Thesis meets antithesis, producing the terrible synthesis: numb zealotry. Who'd have thunk it? The man who made a religion out of politics, and whose ideas made a right mess of the 20th century, was a prophet after all, though perhaps not quite in the way he intended.

Alas, such is the strange alchemy of dialectical materialism: The past cannot predict the future, and never repeats it. How could it, when into the roiling crucible of history, there always drops an unknown quantity? The present is always a mysterious hybrid. Unique and surprising each time. Not what we expected at all.

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But, of course, these are by no means normal circumstances, and for once, unbelievably, those same fixture lunatics and unheeded cranks who have been foretelling the end of the world for so long may just have turned out to be right after all. Or so it seems, when you consider that the unthinkable has in fact happened: The world, or at least capitalism's symbolic equivalent, the World Trade Center, has fallen down around us. Add to that the haunting (and until now absurdly superstitious) fact that 2001, not 2000, is the actual Millennium, and suddenly, those brainsick bag ladies you see around Grand Central start to sound a lot like Cassandras -- bona fide prophetesses doomed never to be believed until it's too late.

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By now, every prospective surfer in the country knows that at least seven other surfers have been bitten by sharks in the past few weeks, all in the same stretch of water off Smyrna Beach, where a surfing competition recently took place. (I should make it clear here that I'm not talking about the two other swimmers, one in North Carolina and one in Virginia, who have been killed by sharks in recent days. Neither of them went into the water knowing the dangers.) Some Smyrna surfers, however, having been made aware of the considerable risks, have insisted on braving the waves anyway, which is, of course, their prerogative. But, as always, there's a hitch. That prerogative of doing what you like with your body comes with a price. Paradoxically, freedoms don't come free. They come with responsibilities attached.

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But then again, Faderman, who has made a career out of writing lesbian herstory, isn't slaving away in the archival trenches because she wants to give you a good time. She's out to leave a record of a small but very real part of American life that, until a little over a decade ago, had never found its way into print, except distortedly in sexology manuals written by crackpots like Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In this regard Faderman is an admirably unselfish scholar. Like her previous books ("Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present," "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America"), "To Believe in Women" is a thorough and laudable piece of work that should stand up well in the eyes of future historians and curious lay people.

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In the middle of the night, our surrogate Adam and Eve, 7-year-old Mara and her younger brother Dann, are kidnapped from their home in the southern region of the continent called Ifrik. They are deposited at a safe house farther north where intermittent droughts and floods have made the land all but uninhabitable except by giant lizards, insects and a few hearty survivors known as "the rock people." So begins Mara and Dann's arduous and perilous journey ever farther north toward their Eden, the lush and clement northern coast of Ifrik. As they grow into adolescents, and then young adults, they travel through hundreds of miles of terrain dotted by various troubled civilizations.

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If you know anything about McKibben's publisher, that paradigmatic corporate behemoth Simon & Schuster, you know that "Hundred Dollar Holiday" is the kind of leaflet -- at 96 pages, it can't rightly be called a book -- that their sales force positively cooed over. It's money for nothing, fluff in a brown paper bag. It's worldly wisdom whittled down to the size and scope of a Zagat's for Wilmington, Del. It's a cash grab Christmas "book" that, irony of all ironies, subtlety of all subtleties, tells you not to spend so much money on Christmas. Is this marketing cynicism at its worst and cleverest, or is this boardroom cupidity rising to new heights?

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