Anarchy

SEATTLE -- It took only a few minutes for the people in the monarch butterfly costumes and union jackets to realize that what was planned as the biggest American demonstration yet against global trade here yesterday had turned into a burst of window-breaking and looting in the late afternoon light.A surge of violence that ended in a civil emergency began when a knot of people clad in black broke away from the main demonstration and started overturning Dumpsters, stoking fires and smashing windows of stores and restaurants.

CHARLES Taylor's little Libya-trained force started Liberia's civil war in 1990 to overthrow the dictator Samuel Doe, who was duly murdered by a rival warlord. Mr. Taylor is more responsible than any other individual for the anarchy, brutality, population displacements, societal breakdown and massive misery that descended on his country, which was founded by freed American slaves and modeled on U.S. institutions.Now an election has been held. Mr. Taylor appears to have won three-fourths of the vote for president in a field of 12. Admittedly, many demoralized and dislocated Liberians did not vote, but among those who did, Mr. Taylor is the overwhelming choice, perhaps because he threatened more war if he did not win. Jimmy Carter, the world's chief inspector of elections, said this one was better run than those he observed in Bosnia, Croatia and Haiti.

PRESIDENT SALI BERISHA of Albania, once heralded as the lone democrat of the Balkans, picked the wrong moment to have his parliament re-elect him to a second five-year term, just after giving him emergency powers. Albania has, in the southern coastal towns, dissolved into anarchy.The ostensible target of the rioters' wrath was a group of state-protected fraudulent pyramid investment schemes that collapsed, impoverishing most Albanians. But increasingly, their real target was the strong-man rule of President Berisha.

ALTHOUGH several European institutions were available to serve as umbrella for an intervention force in Albania, their members chose the United Nations instead. The Security Council has authorized such a force, to consist entirely of Europeans and not the usual mix of peace-keepers.The problem in Albania is nothing like that in Bosnia, which pinned down 50,000 NATO troops. It more nearly resembles Somalia, with anarchy rather than civil war. The military mission is to protect humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine.

JAKARTA -- The wiser among Indonesia's rich and powerful avoid using the word ''succession,'' lest the president hear of it. The story goes that one of Suharto's favorites, a general named Benny Murdani, lost his position a few years ago when he asked the president what he thought of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stepping aside for younger men in Singapore.President Suharto, the second post-colonial leader of this vast archipelago country, is 75 years old. He took power in a military coup that removed the unstable founding father, President Sukarno.

AMERICANS fashioned a system for governing the country that left individuals free to do whatever they thought best. Yet we knew from the very beginning that unbridled individualism would do us in if we didn't have something to bind us together.So we agreed on a Constitution with a common set of laws. We raised barns together and told stories about the past in order to impress upon the next generation the importance of mutual aid. We created symbols to evoke a shared sense of allegiance. And we built public schools, schools free to all and common to almost all.Of course, schools were expected to educate individual children, but in doing that they served a larger purpose.

GUATEMALA'S government and rebels plan to sign a final treaty Sunday to end 36 years of civil war that killed at least 100,000 and perhaps 140,000 people in that little, poor country. It will arrive none too soon.Support from the rest of the Americas comes in the form of an $84.8 million loan package. It was approved by the Inter-American Development Bank to rebuild infrastructure that was destroyed by war. Involved representatives of devastated communities will help choose the projects.Unfortunately, what was war has given way to crime and anarchy.

KOBE, Japan -- Nature is chaotic; Japan is not.Amid the wreckage from Tuesday's devastating earthquake, orderly lines emerge for water and food, strangers cooperate to make high school basketball courts livable refugee centers.There has been no crime."There is no formal system," says David Pilgrim, an English businessman who lives among these people."But everyone is willing to wait in a queue, no one steals, no one loots.That is Japan; that is why it works."The dedication to order takes place against a backdrop of desperation and extraordinary ruin.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loose upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.-- The Irish poet W. B. YeatsA city police officer dies.Another lies wounded.A third, in Baltimore County, survives an assassination attempt only by the grace of God.When city officers respond to a reported shooting at a public high rise, they are confronted by a handful of angry residents who shake their fists, shout epithets and pelt them with debris.

WHY ARE WE in America so violent?What can we do about it?I asked these questions almost a month ago, and invited readers to share thoughts on the subject. The 82 letters I've received show clearly that no one has The Answer.That's because there is no single answer. Our uniquely high rate of violence is intimately related to our unique society -- unique in its history, its evolution, it composition, its politics and its morals. If we are to ease the plague of violence sweeping this country, we must endeavor to understand the complexities of our circumstances.

In my graduate class on Arab politics, we would often puzzle over decisions autocratic leaders have made that did not seem to make sense, either in moral or strategic terms. It was often tempting to take the intellectually lazy route and think they were simply crazy or stupid. In order to make the discussion more productive, the professor would suggest that we assume the leaders are at least as smart as ourselves. In recent weeks, the only person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing was released to Libyan soil, where he received a jubilant welcome organized by Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Kadafi.

IT'LL BE a long, hot summer for the men and women of the 3rd Infantry Division. Savoring their quick victory in Iraq, they were supposed to be coming home soon - but two unforeseen problems have put a wrench into those plans. The first problem has to do with the unfinished nature of the victory. For a while, Pentagon officials explained away the continued violence and anarchy in Iraq by saying they never expected the regime to collapse so swiftly. But it's a safer and safer bet to say they also never expected the last remnants of resistance to persevere for so long.

Penn & Teller know no boundaries. And that, they say without hesitation, is easily the best thing about being Penn & Teller. "It's being able to do whatever you want," says Penn Jillette, the thicker, taller and audible half of the illusion-obsessed duo, whose act will be on display at the Lyric through Sunday. "It's having really only one other person in the world that I have to clear something with before I put it in the show," says Teller, who's actually got a fine, measured speaking voice, even though it's never heard in the act. "For the Penn & Teller show that you see here, if we say it goes in, it goes in. That's an amazing freedom."

SEATTLE -- It took only a few minutes for the people in the monarch butterfly costumes and union jackets to realize that what was planned as the biggest American demonstration yet against global trade here yesterday had turned into a burst of window-breaking and looting in the late afternoon light.A surge of violence that ended in a civil emergency began when a knot of people clad in black broke away from the main demonstration and started overturning Dumpsters, stoking fires and smashing windows of stores and restaurants.

CHARLES Taylor's little Libya-trained force started Liberia's civil war in 1990 to overthrow the dictator Samuel Doe, who was duly murdered by a rival warlord. Mr. Taylor is more responsible than any other individual for the anarchy, brutality, population displacements, societal breakdown and massive misery that descended on his country, which was founded by freed American slaves and modeled on U.S. institutions.Now an election has been held. Mr. Taylor appears to have won three-fourths of the vote for president in a field of 12. Admittedly, many demoralized and dislocated Liberians did not vote, but among those who did, Mr. Taylor is the overwhelming choice, perhaps because he threatened more war if he did not win. Jimmy Carter, the world's chief inspector of elections, said this one was better run than those he observed in Bosnia, Croatia and Haiti.

ALTHOUGH several European institutions were available to serve as umbrella for an intervention force in Albania, their members chose the United Nations instead. The Security Council has authorized such a force, to consist entirely of Europeans and not the usual mix of peace-keepers.The problem in Albania is nothing like that in Bosnia, which pinned down 50,000 NATO troops. It more nearly resembles Somalia, with anarchy rather than civil war. The military mission is to protect humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine.

JAKARTA -- The wiser among Indonesia's rich and powerful avoid using the word ''succession,'' lest the president hear of it. The story goes that one of Suharto's favorites, a general named Benny Murdani, lost his position a few years ago when he asked the president what he thought of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stepping aside for younger men in Singapore.President Suharto, the second post-colonial leader of this vast archipelago country, is 75 years old. He took power in a military coup that removed the unstable founding father, President Sukarno.

PRESIDENT SALI BERISHA of Albania, once heralded as the lone democrat of the Balkans, picked the wrong moment to have his parliament re-elect him to a second five-year term, just after giving him emergency powers. Albania has, in the southern coastal towns, dissolved into anarchy.The ostensible target of the rioters' wrath was a group of state-protected fraudulent pyramid investment schemes that collapsed, impoverishing most Albanians. But increasingly, their real target was the strong-man rule of President Berisha.

GUATEMALA'S government and rebels plan to sign a final treaty Sunday to end 36 years of civil war that killed at least 100,000 and perhaps 140,000 people in that little, poor country. It will arrive none too soon.Support from the rest of the Americas comes in the form of an $84.8 million loan package. It was approved by the Inter-American Development Bank to rebuild infrastructure that was destroyed by war. Involved representatives of devastated communities will help choose the projects.Unfortunately, what was war has given way to crime and anarchy.

AMERICANS fashioned a system for governing the country that left individuals free to do whatever they thought best. Yet we knew from the very beginning that unbridled individualism would do us in if we didn't have something to bind us together.So we agreed on a Constitution with a common set of laws. We raised barns together and told stories about the past in order to impress upon the next generation the importance of mutual aid. We created symbols to evoke a shared sense of allegiance. And we built public schools, schools free to all and common to almost all.Of course, schools were expected to educate individual children, but in doing that they served a larger purpose.