Saturday's New York anti-war rally was completely devoid of anti-Saddam signs, yet was not devoid of 70-year-old communists passing out copies of their newspaper, The Militant. The nadir of what I saw that day was when a New York City fire truck came barreling down Sixth Ave. with sirens blazing, running directly into the rally at 34th St. (where Sixth and Broadway cross). Showing that post-9/11 fireman fetishism lives on, the crowd rightly cheered the firemen, yet didn't get out of the way so they could go fight their fire. And bad, bad stuff happened all over the country too: Sullivan reports that people were literally defecating in the streets in San Francisco, and back at Brandeis a noted sociology professor, who is known worldwide for his theories in regards to the "Mutuality Paradigm," and has often declared that all humanity must join hands and get along in order to heed off the end of the world, got up at an anti-war rally and referred to the members of an undergraduate pro-war group as "freaks."

-I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in Philadelphia, and while there's barely a city block in Manhattan that isn't covered with "Stop the War" and "Bush =Warmonger" signs, I noticed a near-complete lack of anti-war sentiment of any kind in any area of Center City, including the parts that are the counterparts of, say, the Upper West Side or Greenwich Village. I can't think of any sociological explanation for the difference, other than perhaps the presence in New York of an established community of radicals that Philadelphia doesn't have. The only exception was when I bought a bootleg of a 2001 U2 concert at Repo Records on South St., and the bootlegger had given the CD the imaginative title of "Kill George Bush Jr." Bono may be a big liberal, but I know he wouldn't approve.

-In all seriousness, my thoughts and prayers and those of so many others are with our troops in Iraq and elsewhere, bravely risking their lives for the causes of freedom and democracy worldwide. I can't describe how proud I am of them; come home soon, guys.