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Norway rats or house flies
Saturday, September 15 2001
If you go to binLaden.com, you actually find yourself at the crude homepage of Osama bin-Laden's family, the Saudi construction monopoly from whom this terrorist leader received his vast nine figure trust fund. It's creepy in the same way as Hitler's architectural paintings from the time before he was interested in politics.
It's being called "America's New War," yet no one seems to know who to fight or how to find the enemy on the field of battle, or even the field of battle itself. Sure, we have endless firepower and the support of nearly every nation, but we're dealing with an enemy so distributed, grassrooted, and self-replenishing that we might as well be fighting a war against the Norway rats or house flies. I agree, those maniacs really fucked us with the stunt they pulled on Tuesday. But who exactly do we shoot? How many do we kill before we say we won? It seems it would be a lot easier to close up the security holes demonstrated by this incident and put a task force in charge of looking for others. When it comes to big airplanes, huge office buildings, nuclear power plants, and municipal water supplies, logistical planners have to factor in the possible ways our metaphoric legs can be tripped up. We're a big powerful country with awesome facilities and futuristic concentrations of vulnerable citizens, and when we're effectively tripped we can fall terribly hard. If you are concerned about being a victim of suicidal terrorists, here are some steps you can take to lessen your chances of being killed:
- Don't live in a major city. It's unlikely a terrorist will attack a city even as large as Baltimore, Pittsburgh, or Milwaukee. If you must live in a place like New York, pick a less flamboyant borough such as Brooklyn. An added bonus is that real estate is cheaper in these places.
- Don't live or work in an important landmark. Skyscrapers are deathtraps, Titanics upon the land. There was an eerie similarity between the doomed towers and the Titanic, with one major exception: there was no possible way to rescue the people stranded in the floors above those impacted by the jetliners.
- Don't live near a big dangerous facility. This includes places downstream from dams, near nuclear plants, or skyscrapers.
That said, I think our guys need to meet with the Taliban and tell them to give us Osama bin Laden or we'll somehow find a way to make Afghanistan even more miserable than it is already. I think if things were presented in the right way, they'd do exactly as we say. This doesn't have to be a war. But we'd have to see this as what it would be: a symbolic success. There will be more suicidal terrorists no matter what we do.
I'm not comfortable with this new single-minded discussion-proof patriotic fervor sweeping the land. Frankly, it disgusts me. It's not so much the fervor itself that I dislike (In New York at least, it seems like a natural reaction to a terrible calamity), it's all the political and media spin applied to this fervor. Everyone is seeing what they want to see in this fervor. Our own Christian version of the Taliban see it as "a spiritual re-awakening." World War II veterans see it as confirmation the kids really are, as Pete Townshend told them long ago, alright.
When I was walking Sally this afternoon, I bought an icecream sandwich from a Pakistani merchant on the edge of Prospect Park. It was frozen so hard that I nearly broke my teeth eating it. After walking for awhile in the woods, I eventually came upon a Norway rat. Sally saw it and would have chased it, but I had her secured on a leash. Gretchen doesn't want Sally to ever succeed at being a predator.
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