The Terrorist Fungus
Submitted by Charley Underwood on July 29, 2007 - 4:38pm.
I was in line for airport security a couple of weeks ago. I looked down at my feet and realized that, like half of those with me, I had on sandals and no socks. The sandals would soon be coming off, and my bare feet would be walking across the same floor as thousands of other bare feet that day. I started wondering how many of my predecessors had athlete’s foot or other communicable problems.
Suddenly, I had an epiphany: what if it was all part of an Osama bin Laden plot! What if we were simply being distracted by yesterday’s danger of hijacked airlines, while submitting to today’s danger of millions of new cases of athlete’s foot? Imagine the consequences. An American nation weakened, hobbling around on itchy, burning feet while mad fundamentalists took over the world. Like a magician’s unsuspecting rubes, we had been looking in the wrong place while the evil mastermind had concocted a new danger to strike us unawares.
As the days have passed, I have come to understand what a diabolical plan Al Qaeda has set into motion. I mean, here we are, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, spending a couple of trillion dollars to fight a war we cannot win, sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines to guard impossibly vulnerable pipelines and close permanently porous borders. The scale of economic and human waste is staggering, of course, but I have come to understand that the war itself is not even the point. What we are dealing with here is a subtle plan to destroy our civilization while we don’t even notice. It is much like the magician’s slight of hand, directing our attention elsewhere while he produces the rabbit from the hat or the coin from behind our ear.
While we have been distracted by the war, Osama and his cohorts have been up to no good. Consider the following:
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda shipped all of America’s manufacturing jobs to other countries, leaving our nation like helpless pigs waiting for other nations to fill the trough.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda took all the resources out of our schools, leaving an entire generation of children unprepared to make intelligent decisions, prey to superstition and fundamentalism.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda gradually deprived our citizens of healthcare, leaving us sick and weakened, ripe for an attack.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda made us buy enormous quantities of fashionable trinkets (manufactured in other countries), putting us into impossible debt (often to countries like China, which are loaning us the money).
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda took the money from our infrastructure, so that soon our bridges will collapse under our heavy S.U.V.s and our roads will fill with potholes. Al Qaeda has been particularly successful in depriving us of the investments needed to develop clean and sustainable energy self-reliance, so that we daily become more dependent on the petroleum of other countries.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda tricked us into giving up our liberties and into relying on methods like torture, which have in turn taught the countries of the world to fear and hate us.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda made our government corrupt and our citizens mistrustful of that government.
When we weren’t looking, Al Qaeda made us rely on mercenary armies, which have no loyalty to our once-great nation.
In short, while we have been paying attention to the war, Al Qaeda has undermined every single structure that once made our nation strong. We are now the biggest debtor country of the world, living for the moment with no thought to the future, undereducated and under-informed, susceptible to disease and panic, mistrusting ourselves and our elected officials…a fruit ripe for the picking.
It is a sad state of affairs indeed, to finally understand that our civilization has been dismantled behind our backs, even as we thought we were fighting terrorism. I think I hear some cruel laughter from a cave in western Pakistan.
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Such a diabolical plot!
Epiphany
I also took a flight a couple of weeks ago, Charley. I traveled in uniform, coming home from Iraq. I also had to go through security screening, but, like an intelligent person, I had anticipated it, and was prepared. I didn't balk at the inconvenience, but rather I felt safer for the security being provided. Maybe fashion has changed in the 2 years I was gone, but I thought it was pretty rude for a man to wear sandals in public, unless he was a aging hippie.
As for the rest of your litany of complaints, you seem to misunderstand. Bin Laden and his followers don't want to inconvenience you, or slowly erode what you percieve to be personal liberties. He wants to kill you. He wants to cut your head off with a knife and brag about it to his followers. He wants to dispatch suicide bombers to America to kill your family.
And you really think he is interested in trinkets or manufacturing jobs? Seriously?
People doing the right thing
I appreciate you as a soldier doing the right thing. I do not question you, actually I don't even question the military leadership, I question the civilian leadership at the top. Somewhere there has to the political diplomatic solution after the military has given the opportunity for that to happen. And this military gave years of opportunities. This civilian leadership is not even talking to all of the folks involved. Talking is not giving up, it is always the first step in every political diplomatic solution.
I do question the level of security required at airports when every foreign container shipped to the US is not being inspected. It is like loading up on the front castle gates while no one watches the rear entrance. We find this mismatch in how we do security so painfully wrong, that we have to make jokes about it.
As for Bin Laden, last I heard he was in Pakistan. Last I heard Iraq people were mad because their loved ones were killed, because they lack food, electricity, clean water and because they want to run their own country. So you were there? Tell us why are Iraq people mad at us?
the "aging hippie" responds
Hi, Dave. Good to hear from you again. I have a couple of small points in response to you comment, plus one longer one.
First, in a historic context, I was never a hippie. It's true that my coming-of-age time was the 60's, but there were generally two counter-cultural responses to the changes of that era. One was the hippie thing of long hair, lots of drugs and a general withdrawal from the sexual constraints of the 50's. But a completely different impulse was that of the protester who kept his hair short, actually dressed up to get arrested (civil rights and Vietnam things primarily), generally did well in the college classes they took and did lots of electoral campaigning and outreach to church groups. I was in that second group, and I am still quite comfortable with never having done LSD or mushrooms, while I did door-knocking for Gene McCarthy in places like Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
The second small point is that I am currently having a challenge with Achilles tendonitis and those sandals are about I can wear right now. Even if I typically wore sandals all summer, that would still not be a major problem in my opinion. Jesus and the disciples wore sandals, for goodness sake, and the only problem that caused was that they occasionally needed to wash each other's feet. There is no disrespect intended toward anyone.
The big problem, however is that you and I see this war quite differently and I am beginning to think that we always will. You think that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (plus the coups in Venezuela, Haiti, Somalia and elsewhere) are making us safer. I think they are making things much more dangerous, and I further see this huge contradiction in ramming democracy down someone's throat at the barrel of a gun.
Let me tell you how I think this is all going to play out. I think that the United States will eventually have to leave Iraq, since there is absolutely no way that our military strategy can win against that insurgency. I think that the United States will sink into another uncertain period, where people completely mistrust the government and mistrust our leaders. I think there will be 30 years where people like you blame people like me for the loss of the war. And I think people like me will blame people like you for supporting such a foolish venture in the first place. New facts will come out concerning the conduct of the war, but most people will not know of them.
Then, if there is still a United States after that time, we will probably do the whole thing all over again, with a new imperial war in a new location, probably against a dictator that we are supporting right now.
There are some alternate possibilities, of course. One is that the United States may have strayed so far from its ideals that it gives up on democracy altogether, allowing a true coup d-etat to succeed, with the entire electoral system replaced by a more military structure.
A possibility that I like much better is that hundreds of thousands of people like you eventually wake up and realize that you have been used and manipulated by some very corrupt characters who have never had your best interests in mind. You may need medical treatment, for example, and wonder why the progressives are pushing for you to get it while the neocons cut off the funds. You may lack economic opportunities and eventually figure out that the only people who got rich off this war are the oil barons and military contractors. You may experience troubling times and eventually seek therapy, eventually to discover the many self-destructive mechanisms you have used to avoid confronting your own part in this tragic war.
I will eventually quit writing to you, Dave, because it will probably become apparent that you need to blame someone for the horror of this war, and it will be easier for you to blame me than to look at the true responsibility. I will eventually quit writing to you, not because I am afraid of you or of your opinions, but simply to take away the false target of your misplaced anger.
Unless you change, however Dave, we will never see eye-to-eye on this war. You will need to find it noble as a way of justifying your participation in it. I will view it as a huge human waste that has weakened the country that I love.
Wow. so much more polite...
Wow. That was so much more polite than the response I was going to post ... [chuckles to himself]