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Posted on 09/14/2001 5:59:55 AM PDT by vrwc54

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- Now again the civilized world has witnessed the true nature of barbarism; not the Hollywood presentation, but the reality.

Civilization has witnessed it before: the Nazis stomping the unarmed, the Communists pillaging the bourgeoisie, Middle Eastern terrorists slaughtering unarmed Jews and Christians, and in 1993 Americans in their first atrocities at the World Trade Center. And we are witnessing the true nature of the civilized -- first grief, then resolve to extirpate the barbarians.

At the home of the solicitor general of the United States the night of Sept. 11 they grieved with one of the civilized's most noble, Theodore B. Olson, the husband of that other noble soul, Barbara Olson, the author and political commentator who perished with all the other innocents when American Airlines flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon.

The Olsons' friends drifted out to their home unbidden to shoulder his grief. Opening the front door into the vaulted foyer of a country house decorated in Barbara's exquisite taste, we pass the silk flag of the Justice Department standing eight feet tall (Ted has served the department twice). To join the Olsons' friends in the sitting room beyond, we pass through the green lacquered library, full of the hundreds of books the Olsons read, some of which Barbara wrote.

What catches the eye is the framed picture of Barbara, beautiful, blond, and smiling the smile that delighted her friends and intimated to an adversary that, quite possibly, he had just been outsmarted. If eyes were not damp already, they became damp at that spot in the library. I felt a catch in my throat, and in the sitting room beyond, Ted's friends mingled in a sough of grief until they confronted Ted.

"No long faces here," the solicitor general quietly enjoins. I have never known Olson to utter a word that was not wise and prodigiously intelligent. He always strikes the right temperament. And so we try to smile.

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