Pogo Was Right

After my immersion year in dour Swedish mysteries, I have a better sense of the general Scandinavian depression over its recent openness to the world's ills and the (perhaps overstated by Henning Mankell) fear of immigrants that drives some public policy. It was not surprising, then, that the initial reports out of Oslo blamed Norway's part in the coalition fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. After all, here, too, our first assumption would be to blame the Unknown Other, especially if that Other wore funny clothing and prayed five times a day. So how earthshaking must it be that Norway's greatest disaster since WWII seems to have been perpetrated by one of its own, a Christian conservative nationalist with apparent anti-Muslim tendencies who quotes John Stuart Mill?

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