I just finished reading the Man Booker prize-winning novel The Finkler Question. It’s OK. The explosive packages sent from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago could have been a scene from the book.

It’s interesting that no one here seems at all surprised that an attempted attack on America is simultaneously an attack on synagogues rather than on Tom Daschle or The National Inquirer.

As for America itself, there is still hope: a country whose bipartisan money-losing post office, a possible synechdoche for the entire country, can nevertheless come from behind to build an APC (Automatic Postal Center) that makes mailing certified envelopes an automated breeze, can’t be all bad, as I was reminded again this morning. If the people who rethought the process of mailing and then built the APC could rethink and then tackle the airline security system and the entire tax code from scratch, we could be on our way.