The attack on London Bridge - no, not the attack, the new one - broke just as I was heading off to guest-host Tucker's show at Fox News. There is a small and rather sad "Christmas market" of pop-up stalls at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 44th Street - surrounded, of course, by large concrete blocks placed there in case any radicalized SUV or extremist mid-size rental car were minded to drive up on the sidewalk and mow down shoppers.
In more sophisticated societies such as Angela Merkel's Germany, the so-called "Merkel Lego" barricading Christmas fairs is painted to look like giant, ill-proportioned candy canes or huge misshapen holly leaves, to add a festive gaiety to security measures. I passed them almost every day in the last week, and reflected each time on how we've agreed to let everything get so bloody ugly in order to avoid addressing what we once used to fret over as the "root causes".
Mid-town Manhattan traditionally looks beautiful and magical at Yuletide, but that was before it was agreed that, as a young German lady put it to me three years ago, " Christmas will be a target. So, an hour or so after the first reports out of London, the NYPD swung into action and the ugly concrete blocks on Sixth Avenue were augmented by a police cruiser flashing blue lights and officers prowling the perimeter - to reassure the public that it's possible to shop here with a minimal chance of being stabbed, run over or blown up.
That is, if you're the sort of Christmas shopper who likes to do his Christmas shopping in a sealed fortress. Say what you like about Amazon, but it's likely to be the last bollard-free retail experience in the western world. London Bridge, of course, was fully bollarded and aesthetically disfigured after the last attack by a mysteriously radicalized motor vehicle, just two years ago. If you think that's pretty funny, Friday's attack was even more of a side-splitter: Usman Khan, a "British man" as the media instruct us to think of him, was a convicted terrorist, tried and gaoled for his part in a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange.
In , he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, and the judge ordered him to serve at least eight. Which seems fair enough, since it would be prudent for a city as dependent on "financial services" as London to disincentivize the detonation of the Stock Exchange. Yet here we are, and six years later Usman Khan is out of his cell on something called "license", which is a type of probation.
