Imagine how pissed off we'd be if someone blew up the Library of Congress. Yet that's exactly what's happened in Iraq, and according to many reports we haven't done much to stop any looting at all, except for those precious oil fields.

You can call me a partisan, cynical, contrary sonuvabitch all you want, but the fact is that as a reader, as a writer, as someone who treasures history, and as a thinker, I feel sick over this. And what makes it worse is that I feel in my guts that George Bush and his cabal don't even give a rat's ass. Bush's animosity toward the intellectual is well-known, and has been sifted over dozens of times by the media. So I know that when he reads (if he reads; this is after all the man who spent the first week of the war avoiding watching the TV, until he got called on it by the press) that Korans and other historic books are burnt to ashes that it's just so many marks on old smelly paper. Doesn't mean anything. Right?