The only hope is that Americans can learn to cooperate on signal. We don’t have to know in detail one of the most elusive and ignored laws of physics for it to work. All we have to do is stand by our toilets. At the signal, having fully evacuated, we all flush at the same time.

Kurt Zeitgeist Angst, professor of mononucleosis at the Freidreich Von Hopscotch Technical School discovered the thirty-fifth law of Newtonian gravity which predicates that shit will rise to meet its own level. Since, at the moment, the highest concentration of excrement is in Afghanistan, the entire flushed load’s electrocharged matter will be drawn down and through the earth’s water table to it. Don’t drink tap water for at least 24 hours!

This law of gravity will be easier to imagine if you think of films like "Big Country." After years of drilling dry holes, these wildcatters just sense that under Mrs. Caffrey’s vegetable garden lies the biggest oil field in the world.. The oil drill begins pumping away when suddenly a great gusher of black, oily slime shoots up hundreds of feet. The crowd is soaked in this ooze. But it is smiling. "Liquid Gold! Liquid Gold!" they all shout.

About a week after America unloads the product will have accumulated under Afghanistan. The Mujahadeen, Mullahs, Fajites, Kumquots, Ulemas and CIA agents will hear strange rumblings at night like when your bed companion says "hey that’s not me!" Tribal chieftains will notice a strange colored liquid seeping up from crevices. They only have to have the curiosity to chip at the crevices and suddenly they will be hit in the face with this natural resource. "Oil! Great Allah in your infinite wisdom You have finally given us what we deserve."

American intelligence picks up strange discolorations and ground tremors inside Afghanistan. Satellite imaging shows the Mujahadeen, Mullahs, Fajites, Kumquots, Ulemas and CIA agents sporting their distinctive green bombardier jackets and caps and just on the edge of the picture Muammar Qaddaf getting any kind of pump available. They steal bicycle pumps, ½" pumps, organ bellows, old Soviet truck engines, kidney dialysis pumps, fire hydrants, irrigation pumps, dental suction pumps and service station pumps, they capture human and animal gases in balloons, unexploded land mines and suicide pilots who fly planes loaded with gasoline into promising valleys where brown springs have suddenly appeared all over, along with small flowers that never grew in this deserted country before.

Finally, they persuade a couple of American Indian arsonists to come over and conduct earthquake dances. No one can remember how often they get earthquakes because nothing’s ever come down and the seismological department of Kabul University long ago was converted to the study of Jihads, Bayans, Sharias, Fatwas Encyclicals and the American Football League.

But the pressure has been building up something awful. The Indians can only produce the most pathetic quake. It didn’t even register in the "Afghan terrorist" training camps across the border in Pakistan. The neophyte terrorists slept on despite the shaking. But Afghanistan began having the runs. Finally, there were explosions that could be smelled as far away as Calcutta, which is hard to believe. Calcutta has stench of its own that usually covers any other peculiar odor. The Mujahadeen, Mullahs, Fajites, Kumquots, Ulemas and CIA agents sporting their distinctive green bombardier jackets and caps were running around with wooden pails scooping up the liquefied crap and pouring it into their tanks, airplanes, three old Soviet helicopters and the few battered Russian automobiles that remained. Even Ulemas (Afghan Supreme Court judges) were ordering their clerks to bring in the evidence, which they poured into their gas lamps.

They couldn’t start any equipment and the longer the feces just lay there the more it began to smell like their goat’s cheese. They smelled a rat and the rat was the Evil One in Washington.

They set about to build a lighter than air balloon to crash into the world’s largest restrooms at Disney World in Florida. After a couple of weeks the liquid in the balloon became volatile and the whole balloon violently voided itself, killing several mechanics and sending a terrorist first class into orbit.

This was the end of winter. It was a hard winter. During the first weeks of spring Allah produced a miracle. The shit obviously could only make bowels run, but as fertilizer it was better than Scotts Lawn Feed Deluxe. Deserts that never produced a blade of grass overnight grew grass high as an Elephant’s ass. © Rogers and Hammerstein, "Oklahoma?" The chief priests and the rabbis (some of the seed inside that fertilizer grew some very weird combinations) decided to use the whole southern half of Afghanistan for truck farming and make million dollar deals with wholesale markets in Karachi and even New Delhi. They planted the entire country with avocados.

The following year another miracle occurred on the bleak northern plains and up the rugged mountainsides. Small maple, aspen, pine, spruce and other trees began to sprout. The Mullahs decided there was a niche market in that part of the world for Christmas trees. The following winter Afghanistan outstripped Nova Scotia as the world’s biggest Christmas tree supplier.

They made a killing. But they had a problem with unsold trees In fact, they sent a mission to the Vatican to petition the Pope to declare a second Christmas. No dice. But they enjoyed their stay in Rome. Some of them in fact never went home.

There was nothing for them to do but gather up all the trees in a great woodpile. When the wind was in the right direction, they lit the bonfire. Allah! Allah! They cried in fear as they saw clouds of cinders from the fire fly across the Persian Gulf. Within hours, the cinders started something, the entire Kuwaiti oil fields. And the cinders kept blowing westward until Iraq and Saudi Arabia lit up the night sky. Geologists predict that Saudi Arabia will be illuminated for 400 years before electricity will be necessity again. That is a bit of luck. Both Saudia Arabia and Iraq returned to their fundamentalist roots as poor, insignificant Berber nomads. They raised an army of terrorists who flew planes into Afghanistan’s avocado fields, but couldn’t kill themselves because the avocados made a kind of foam layer. Those who tried to destroy the Christmas tree forests didn’t fare so well.

A young inventor found a method of liquefying (no we are not going back to that infantile stuff) wood. He poured the liquefied wood into his new Mercedes Diesel, but it wouldn’t start. He had a brilliant idea. He lit a match and threw it into the exhaust pipe. The car reached 145 mph as a projectile, but then blew up. He realized his mistake was lighting the exhaust rather than the compressing pistons. So he developed a cheap instrument that sparked when inserted into the engine. The car ran as smooth as Bin Laden when the Lone Ranger finally ferreted him out.

The Taliband had been given the heave-ho by a new Moslem offshoot that emphasized the importance of hard work to prove to Allah that they were worthy of his Paradise. Some Afghans even began to drink beer from the hops that grew wild and the berries that were stopping up their toilets, which they had shipped from England. They didn’t know why, but they began to have this compunction to bath everyday like the English infidels and found themselves moaning in their sleep, "cleanliness is next to a good woman."

A visitor said to the Reformed Mosque Mullah, "your country looks like Switzerland. Why don’t you make cheese, open banks, build ski lifts and proclaim yourself a constitutional democracy?" All of which they did with the help of Allah in one day. But in their Koran one day is probably ten thousand because Afghans don’t think that fast.

Andrew E. Carlan
Farmingdale, New York

You can e-mail your comments to Andrew at acarlan@optonline.net.

Andrew Carlan’s Website

Copyright © 2001 Andrew E. Carlan
All Rights Reserved.

The use of this copyright material is limited to display on this website and download for private, non-profit use. Direct quotation must be limited to reasonable length and the material must be properly attributed to the author. The Webmaster of this site shall have the discretion to determine hyperlinks to and from other sites.

-Published with permission