The reactions to the attacks in Paris are very aggravating. I’m not talking about the sadness, the outrage, or even the fear. It is always sad when people die. And it is always outrageous when people are murdered. And I at least understand fear, even if this act shouldn’t elicit that response. The number of people who died yesterday in Paris from these attacks are about double the number of people in America killed with guns on any given day. The specifics don’t matter so much to me. It is all unnecessary death. It makes me sad that humans are this way. But it’s the shock that aggravates me.

I hear a lot of people who are just amazed that people would do this. “They must be crazy!” Maybe so. But I feel fairly certain that the way the terrorists see things, they are acting rationally. This wasn’t just some madman who ran into a shopping mall and started shooting people. This was a well planned operation. There were six coordinated attacks. It was a military style mission and I have little doubt that those who took part considered themselves soldiers in a noble fight.

I know that we here in the US see a drone strike on a wedding party that kills 12 as an unfortunate mistake. I’m among them. I don’t think that anyone in the US military wants to kill innocent people who are celebrating one of our most important cultural signifiers. But that’s pretty easy for me to think. The perspective is certainly very different of the people in Yemen or Afghanistan or any number of other place where the skies are patrolled by our drones.

Roughly 2,500 years ago, Aeschylus wrote in his play Agamemnon, “They raped our queen, so we raped their city, and we were right!” This is the cycle of violence. When two groups go to war, they normally disagree about what the first offense was. Doubtless Priam would not have agreed that the first offense was the “rape” of Helen. So I have a hard time with people who are just shocked at the attacks in Paris. We are engaged in a “war on terror.” Do they think that the terrorists are just going hole up in a compound watching pornography like Osama bin Laden?

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised, to see a CNN headline, US Officials Say No Known Threat to Homeland in Wake of Paris Attacks. The fact that Americans have to be constantly reassured that we are safe is pathetic. We spend roughly half of all the money the world spends on military. We are remarkably safe from all threats except maybe obesity. Yet we still quake in our boots whenever a highly publicized terrorist attack occurs.

According to the Global Terrorism Database, on 13 November 2014, there were 41 terrorist attacks. At least 81 people were killed and at least 62 were injured. But these occurred in places like Iraq, Philippines, Ukraine. And the biggest attack (in terms of death) was “only” 20. CNN didn’t need to assure Americans that they were safe on the same day last year. But if we are going to be afraid, we should be afraid every day, because this stuff happens every day. But it hardly happens at all here.

We are part of this pattern of violence. The worst American delusion is that we just mind our own business and bad things happen to us. We are never just minding our own business. The United States is the most meddlesome country on the planet. And we are far from perfect; just check out Thursday’s Anniversary Post. But I don’t expect us to be; and I don’t think anyone else does either. The real problem is that we do not use our enormous power to limit violence. We are not doing what is needed to reduce things like the horrific mass murders in Paris yesterday. We have allowed the Israel-Palestine conflict to fester for decades. We eagerly destabilized one of the most important countries in the Middle East. And whether our global “war on terror” is creating terrorists faster than it is killing them is a matter of debate.

So be sad about yesterday’s deaths. Be outraged that terrorists decided to murder ordinary people just trying to live their lives. Be afraid that they are coming for us next. But don’t be surprised. “They raped our queen, so we raped their city, and we were right!”

I probably haven’t mentioned it, but I exchanged a number of email messages with David Cay Johnston. He was critical of something that I had written, but generally seemed to have a positive attitude toward me. He called me a “polymath” — which is just about the highest complement you can give me. I bring it up primarily to brag, because I love his work. One of the great things about having this blog is that actual smart people take me half seriously. But in addition to Johnston being brilliant, he is also playful. And that’s got to be why he went to the trouble to write a book review, Trump’s Sloppy, Illogical Crippled America Is a Jumble of Contradictions.

Before I get to it, I want to highlight the subtitle of the book, “How to Make America Great Again.” That reminds me so much of Stephen Colbert’s book, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. Is this really what passes for serious political debate in the United States? Something that Colbert satirized three years ago? Yet that does seem what the Republican base wants — and has wanted for a long time. It isn’t about policy or even ideology. It is about who is “strong” and will make America “great” — things that aren’t concrete — that are just gut-level feelings about some fantasy of what America is. As Colbert put it: the greatness we never weren’t.

What I was most struck with in Johnston’s review was where he starts, “Given how often Donald Trump reminds us of his incredible accomplishments as a businessman, you might reasonably expect that his new book on ‘how to make America great again’ would include a business plan.” But of course it wouldn’t. I noticed at the start of Tuesday’s Republican debate that FNC referred to Trump as a “builder.” He’s not a builder. He’s not even a businessman. He’s a guy with a lot of money who hired other builders and businessmen. As I’ve written about before, he hasn’t made any more money than if he had just put his inheritance in an indexed fund. So of course he has no business plan, because planning isn’t what he does. He’s just a privileged rich kid whose braggadocio conservatives mistake for genius.

As usual with Johnston, he really knows things on the granular level. So he rightly applauds Trump for calling for greater infrastructure spending. But then Trump goes on to call for getting rid of the Rural Utilities Service program — an infrastructure financing program. What’s more, Trump claims it will save us almost $10 billion, but it actually only costs the federal government $400 million. But I suspect Trump would just say that cutting that $400 million would create a 25× multiplier effect. Of course, the more fundamental issue is that this is what Republicans are always for: let’s build infrastructure and make America strong — but let’s not pay for it!

Johnston goes on quite a bit about Trump’s ideas for tax “reform” and just how illogical it is. You should read the whole article. But the main thing is that Trump is like most people in business: he knows what he knows. There is no reason to think that he would understand macroeconomics better than anyone else. The problem with Trump and the thousands of other rich people that the media run to for their thoughts, is that they live in a reality in which they think being rich makes them smart and knowledgeable. Thus, they don’t worry about learning economics. Their hubris makes them especially dangerous, and that’s the most important point about Donald Trump.