Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die.
--Luis Pirandello (1867–1936), Italian author, playwright. The Father, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, act 1 (1921).

I don’t need any more speed. What I need is a villa in the foothills of Kabul and some peace and quiet.
--Mullahs Ben and Jerry Punjabberwocky, Camp Directors Judeo-Christian Aeronautics Institute of Advanced Studies for Expediting Mujahadeen into Paradise

Bush rises to his full Churchillian height and reminds us what this confrontation is all about, people who value freedom and those who fear it. "Don’t let them defeat us by scaring us. Fly and shop."

Boy, He put on notice those 14th century Mongol bandits on a rampage. We’ll show them that we can shop longer and accumulate more frequent flyer miles even while we’re all dropping dead of anthrax.

Report on First Stage Battle for Survival: World Public Opinion Turns Thumbs Down. The relatives of the five thousand people who perished in the World Trade Towers on September 11th must be worried that we’re not making as good an impression on Middle East people as Osama Bin Laden. How about some resourceful American hijacking an Air India plane and flying it into the Taj Mahal. That ought to make a pretty good impression.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) contributed to the advancement of science by discovering the first vaccine for anthrax. Unfortunately, it had few uses until Osama Bin Laden (1957- ) discovered how to create a pandemic by mixing it with ordinary mail. In 2001 the King of Sweden and his blond chick wife awarded Bin Laden the Nobel Prize for Biochemistry and the $150,000 in prize money to spread his discovery worldwide.

Everyone else gets anthrax in powder or spore form. Yesterday, the United Parcel Service call me up and told me to come pick up my herd of sheep. (Some don’t think this funny because they don’t know that anthrax is an infectious disease of warm-blooded animals, especially of cattle and sheep, Others still don’t find it funny.)

Just this morning the Times of London got a call from Bin Laden on his satellite phone. "Oh! Allah! I told those illiterates to send traintracks!:

CNN scooped the other networks last week. They overheard Uzbeki intelligence discussing the Taliban’s disappointment with the sluggish penetration of anthrax into the U.S. market. Bin Laden plans to ratchet up merchandising with an extravaganza with some of the biggest schlock bands at the Main Post Office in Manhattan sometime next month. It will introduce an all-new Anthrax with time-release Prozac to sell under the brand name "A Funny Thing Happened To Me on The Way To The Morgue".

Winston Churchill promised his people nothing but "blood, sweat and tears." When the Nazis reduced London to rubble, I don’t remember he or the Houses of Parliament running off to the countryside. Even the King with two small daughters stayed in Buckingham Palace. They all appeared in the newspapers the next day standing with their people in the ruins.

What effect do you think British stubbornness had on Hitler? Who knows? What effect do you think the House slipping out of Washington under cover of night and leaving black postal workers behind has on Osama Bin Laden? "Boy, they sure can move fast"

The Senate was rumored to be meeting somewhere in Washington’s subway system. The CIA tried to bomb them out but there was an awful lot of collateral damage to platforms and tracks.

Already the House actually left Washington. Unfortunately, they returned. The Senate wavered. Now the State Department and the Justice Department, the CIA and the FBI, our first lines of domestic security, reported anthrax contamination and announced escape preparations. For the first time since James Madison’s presidency in 1813 the Supreme Court determined their safety is more important than continuity. They met at an undisclosed location within a 4500 mile radius of Washington and Dolly Madison Ice Cream was selling in D.C. supermarkets for its lowest price in 30 years, 59¢ a half gallon. If this flight of agencies from Washington isn’t quelled the Internal Revenue Service may close its doors. Then we may yet become the freest people on earth.

Bush’s stupider older father’s troops in Desert Storm reached the outskirts of Damascus, last stop on the city’s subway. Because no one in the whole army had an Iraq dollar and a quarter they stopped.

Christ, they had rockets that could have blown them through the system to downtown Damascus and up the palace stairs to where Saddem Hussein was trying to get it on with his ten year old concubine.

If Daddy Bush’s Desert Sturmtroopers had only been "requested" to walk that extra mile for a couple of lousy camels and a few biological warfare laboratories, suburban woman who are the backbone of Hillary’s support and bleed only when our enemy’s children are hurt while insulting five year old American males in our schools to their faces would have the satisfaction of knowing that every Iraqi kid including Saddam Hussein has been put on Ritalin, has wholesome food that tastes like building material and says only positive things about everyone, even their former dictator, except if he’s a Republican or Christian fundamentalist.

Imagine if the Allies reached the Berlin’s Levittburgh in 1945 and stopped? We did on orders from Truman let the Russians take the city. But at least someone we knew managed to find the time to go downtown and rape and murder a few decent Nazis after five years of war and millions of deaths.

O.K., guys let’s huddle. You gotta try to concentrate on whose on our team and whose on theirs when you throw the ball. We can’t win if we keep passing the ball to our opponents. Hey, you in the back, you’re dozing off. This is serious stuff. I know it can be difficult. The Pros in Washington aren’t exactly leading the league.

In 1998 the State Department reversed itself. Our ally, the Kosovo Liberation Army, overnight became a terrorist organization. The last time I inquired the State Department charged the KLA with using terrorist tactics against Serbian and ethnic Albanian citizens. And France’s Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs said the KLA helped transport $2 billion in drugs a year into Western Europe. Guess whose purse that went into? To win all our enemy has to do is stand and wait for us to shoot ourselves enough times.

Just last year, Bush gave the Taliban $40 million to grow cranberries instead of poppies. Next we’ll have the Colombian cartel joining the international terrorist movement and the Coalition simultaneously.

Professor Henry Kissenger is already booked to explain in the most convoluted way how this is possible. No one has ever understood this man who has cultivated a German-American dialect only he speaks.

To borrow from a saying: Winning isn’t everything, but it looks better on your global resume.

The Pentagon has a problem. "There is a real debate and some bewilderment about what to do if we catch Bin Laden," said Ruth Wedgwood, an international law expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international law specialist at Harvard Law School, who won the lifetime award from "Can You Top This?" has suggested that one way to combat that perception [that the United States would ever be in a war simply to win] would be to have an international terrorism court co-chaired by a Supreme Court justice from the United States and an Islamic jurist of similar rank. [That shouldn’t be hard to find].

How mad should a polite nation allow itself to get that just lost thousands of its civilians in a massacre that competes with Genghis Khan? And as if that wasn’t enough it is now reeling from deliberately spread plague. Here are some answers. The frightening thing may be that the right answer is not among them.

A. The hawks want Bin Laden incinerated. To quote Senator Jesse Helm "screw collateral damage." However, the funeral industry, major contributors to both parties "and our quality of life" in these difficult times" is out in droves trying to locate the panicked House so they can lobby against such cruel and inhuman treatment and the loss of thousands of American jobs.

B. The doves want Bin Laden treated as innocent until proven guilty beyond any doubt. They insist he be tied in non-abrasive handcuffs. Legal scholars argue that he can either choose ¾ due process before the International Court at the Hague and seven free nights at the Edam Hotel on the canal pleasantly overlooking the Hague or he could opt for the American Plan, three meals with the full menu of ACLU tricks provided by Alan Dershowitz, Inc. (Incorrigible) before the Supreme Court.

That involves a big risk since nobody knows what the composition of the Court will be in 2215 when Dershowitz’s great-grandperson will deliver the closing peroration, by then incorporated into a Bible approved by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission headed by Mary Jane Berry X which has been sanitized to include only innocuous phrases mathematically representative of the changing population of the World Coalition of Anti-Terrorist and Pro-Terrorist Nations. By then, this Bible will be in its 5463rd revision.

C. Some suggest both these approaches will only make a martyr of Bin Laden as if he is now widely hated wherever Allah Fitzgerald is worshipped and the best thing to do is to put him on an island like Napoleon. Since we are more enlightened now, the island should allow for some social life. So they are recommending Manhattan.

Where is the highest concentration of terrorist cells and the biggest financiers of international terrorism? Right here. Why is Colombian poppy priced higher than Juan Valdez juice? Because Americans line up to ride the bullet elevator to the top, not the locals that stop at work floors.

Some of our "progressive" fellow citizens in Oakland and Berkeley ought to be tied to them smart bombs, rendering them both dumb. Maybe such wobbly bombs would kill Osana Bin Laden by shrapnel instead of engaging in sanitized bombing as if our objective in Afghanistan is to raise the public health standards of the Afghan people and to introduce a little fun into the Taliban’s joyless life, a piñata flotilla of care packages, a little killing and Christmas rolled into one.

Upper class hatred of America comes like clockwork with every war. Those who have done well at the spigot of capitalism and are its most conspicuous consumers who Ben Laden hates the most can’t distinguish our self-serving foreign policy (like eating is self-serving) and cremating 5000 people. But they do sometimes trip over something funny in their fury. Two good jokes out of 50 slogans wouldn’t get you an audition with Ed Sullivan, event the late Ed Sullivan. See them at:

http://www.lafghanistan.com/laflist.asp

Give us Osana Bin Laden or we’ll send your women to college.

AND

The word came down from postal officials to local postmasters. Don’t refer to mail deliverers as carrying on their jobs despite the anthrax scare. The anthrax thing is enough of a scare for these people. They think delivering mail is a federal mental health program.

Britain’s PM (Prim Minister) is considering new legislation that would make it a crime for humor to demean any people, genders or religion. That sort of narrows jokes to hilarious slipups of mathematicians. A letter to the Times of London included this great old joke--which is definitely a 10-and demonstrates that you can insult people and have a good laugh at their expense all for the same quarter.

The writer warns: [Under the proposed act]"It would become a crime to rerun Not the Nine O’Clock News from all those years ago, especially the scene showing worshippers in a mosque simultaneously bowing to the ground with the voiceover: "’And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contact lens"’

Bin Laden’s family made their billions building Saudi Arabia out of nothing. Being new at heavy construction they made a few mistakes at first. Their biggest was building Jedda Airport. When King Fahd came out to dedicate it he looked puzzled and then sideways. "I never saw a vertical airport before. Will it work?"

Osama Bin Laden just announced he is establishing a 4-H, hatred, hepatitis, hara-kiri, hit-and-run, free tuition scholarship to his terrorist training summer camp for boys and disguised girls. It includes a cave and all the Red Cross food you can steal.

If you think the religious right is bigoted, wait until you meet the Mujahadeen who shave with broken glass and hold that evolution stopped in 700 when the Prophet Mohammed proclaimed death to all who spy. His scribe thought he said all who fly, which is why Afghanistan has more malaria than confident airline passengers.

How are these fanatical Mujahadeen going to be brought down by female special forces? As portrayed in the movies in erotic tights armed with designer zap guns? What! against 15th century testosterone-crazed gangs who are actually huge warts on horses’ backs? Bathe? They get wet when it rains. They can hold only two thoughts at the same time, pilfering and rape. Today we marauder, tomorrow we enter the harem of paradise.

How much interest do you think will be generated in the halls of power after September 11th even among the most liberal Democrats over whether androgynous (like that word) bathrooms should be installed on all submarines? First. women will be defrocked from submarines. That’s if our highest ranking government officials haven’t come down with anthrax in its hallucinatory form.

Islamists do not toss and turn night over gender roles. There are only two genders, men and horses. But they do have this little problem over theocracy which we thought disappeared at the time of the Ice Age.

This war is between those who move aircraft carriers around larger than Afghanistan itself and those who conduct war out of a suitcase. These traveling salesmen have only time. To them a century is a week. Forget the First and Second World Wars. This will be more like The Hundred Years’ Wars.

These are the nomads of Central Asia once again descending on European civilization or what is left of it. It is not the same as any war America has ever fought since America only began fighting wars in 1763. Islam lost the last battle in Europe in1653 at the battlements of Vienna. That’s how come we have Mozart rather than Kurdish folk tunes.

If you still like multiculturalism, it will come packaged for Halloween rather than May Day.

Fundamentalist Islam is a man’s culture in the worst sense, the sense feminists always wanted to make us believe Western man represented. Wait until they try to get the attention of Bin Laden and his disciples to a university forum where the critical question is "are the male and the traditional family superfluous?" or "Date rape: cultural and legal distinctions." The translators will be looking at each other absolutely dumbfounded. "Date rape." Who picks up a women for any other purpose? And NOW at its website is still trying to get Congress to liberate Afghan women. In a month, the rest of us will be up to our eyeballs trying to get our special forces liberated.

If Bush with all his staff can’t get a grip what we are fighting, imagine the "successful" businesswomen trying to twist this into a Third World movement to increase intuition and feeling. They think these zealots loaded with testosterone are just another culture asking for admission to the "gentle" circle of the People’s Republic of Cambridge. They, too, with the force of our law can be civilized on Ritalin-"read make eunuchs"-and learn to eat with knives and forks and pay deference to sickly women who are already adding to their pill-popping.

Ladies. Afghani women do not get facelifts or annual checkups or observe basic sanitation. And they don’t get alimony or child support. Remember from your pre-civilization history? Children belong to their fathers.

They don’t use Anacin or Prozac. They aren’t afraid of pain or death. They aren’t afraid of poverty. They take it as a typical Western insult when we drop food to them or encourage our children to collect nickels to drop on them. Imagine how Hitler would react to collecting winter clothing for the master race. And multiply that by a hundred. To them it is just the attitude of bribe and condescension that started this Armageddon in the first place.

They want nothing from us except everything. They have nothing to lose. Money and wealth are not the same thing. They want communal power and wealth like most primitive peoples. But these primitives know how to use our technology. The combination is lethal.

Yesterday, we fought culture wars in magazines and the New York Times was referee. We just got notice from East of Eden that they’re not planning the next century around the New York Times.

And if feminists thought the religious right was unmoved by their views of family and sex, wait until they meet these Mullahs. Think of Calvin with a turban. Life is not meant to be fulfilling. You won’t find psychologists in the Kabul Yellow Pages.

Whatever the Supreme Court says, pray very hard.

Andrew E. Carlan
Farmingdale, New York

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

Copyright © 2001 Andrew E. Carlan
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