A Gospel of Controversy

So, I actually took a few days off from the political stuff to delve into my other hobby. Playing music in nightclubs. I love that part of my life, and I’m glad I didn’t “grow out of it”, making it something I miss. I still get to jump up there and make way too much noise for small money and tips.

It’s good to be back at my keyboard though. It seems like there’s been some noise being made out on the DNC campaign trail while I was busy. Something about a fire and brimstone preacher pissing off the white folks

“What the hell are you thinking?”

Okay, so I’ll admit that I don’t always see things the way that most people see them.In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I often don’t see things the way that most people see them.It might even be suggested that I have a way of seeing things that lies just on the other side of “What the hell is he thinking?” from just about everyone that I know.And yet, I have a high enough rate of successfully nailing the truth behind complicated issues and convoluted scenarios to allow me to feel

Another Saturday — Another Story

Today’s tale is brought to us by a thoroughly wicked persona that I invented some years ago that I named The Pulpist. The Pulpist’s name suggests a writer of pulp fiction – the kind of crap that you read at the beach and then deposit in the wire mesh trash receptacles that stand guard against the chance that you might feed the ocean any of the

Terrorism in America

— from brndnprkns

Mitt Romney took the podium yesterday at the American Conservative Union’s 2008 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, and burped up what looks to be the centerpiece of the GOP’s table spread for 2008’s turn at hosting our quadrennial Animal House left/right political food fight.

 ”If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23050678/

Okay, so maybe I’m just not paying close enough attention to the news lately – as in over the last six years or so – but to my best recollection, and as a result of my best Google tag word search efforts, there is no terror going on in the USA – well, other than this kind of campfire ghost story nonsense. Am I missing something? Are there pizza parlors being leveled by suicide bombers in downtown Topeka Kansas that I’m just not picking up on the 24/7/365 news crawl as I sit and watch goons like General Romney blather on about protecting me and mine against…

…against what?

I try to imagine an average Israeli housewife sitting through one of these “Oh my God!!” moments where the TV politico gameshow host reaches through the screen to grab you by your collar and shake some sensible dread into you over the lurking terror all around you in this land of porous borders and weak-kneed liberalism, and trying her best to stifle a yawn. She’d take one look at the neighborhood out the bay windows and say “I don’t see it.”.

Frankly, I don’t see it either, and believe me when I shamefully admit that I’m no Israeli housewife when it comes to terrorism and the real threat of danger on a daily basis. I’m as soft and pulp-fleshed as the rest of my American brothers and sisters, and yet, I just don’t feel the imminent threat of a scraggly-bearded madman with a bomb tucked under his blue/gray Northface parka as I wander the boulevards of Main Street America. Now, I do feel the threat of a bull-necked, ‘roid-raged frat moose with a need to kick some random ass tucked under his BU hoodie as I pick my way past the human street litter on Lansdowne Street in Boston, but then, that’s the kind of terror that shows up in the papers. They must be keeping that other news away from us for some reason.

So, why isn’t anyone noticing the fact that, since September 11th of 2001, there hasn’t been one single act of terrorism in this country? Not even a simple car bombing.

Okay, so someone will make the assertion that our “War on Terror” over there has kept them from attacking us over here in the US. (I know, it’s an old riff, but some folks still hold onto it as if it were holy scripture)

I have to respond to that with “If the bulk of our military is sitting in Iraq right now, and Iraq is being attacked on a daily basis by every conceivable method of terrorism short of WMD holocaust, and we have no military sitting on every street corner here…?”

To be honest, I see no need in finishing the question. The entire dichotomy seems to be embarrassingly obvious. Maybe if we tried to assume that the terrorists actually want to do battle with our soldiers, and that this is why they leave us soft and vulnerable American civilian targets alone – all packed into subway cars and buses without any bomb sniffing dogs or guys with Uzi’s standing by – in favor of taking on the nastiest military on the face of the earth? Maybe then it all might make sense?

But then, they’re terrorists because they attack soft and vulnerable civilians – aren’t they? I mean, that is what being a terrorist is all about. Right? Terrorizing innocent people? Isn’t that what terrorism is?

So, how are these terrorists terrorizing anyone in the middle of that madness in Iraq? By blowing themselves up and their fellow citizens? Okay, that could work here. I could see it making some serious headlines, and getting plenty of goosebumps running up and down some arms in this part of the world. But, not in Iraq. At least not after the last 300 bombers.

This year.

Even the best act gets stale after a while. I guess we’re to assume that the mad masterminds behind this Global Islamo-Fascist Jihadist War of Islamic Extremism (I feel the need to put a trademark symbol after all of that) thing are either madder than we imagine, or not as mastermindy as we’ve been led to believe, because this whole blow-ourselves-up-at-you strategy has a definite marketing half-life, and (at least in Iraq) it’s kind of settled back into the over all white noise of the place. In fact, the only good it’s doing anyone is when the footage gets trotted out as proof that we Americans have to stay scared if we ever want to survive long enough to die of the disease that’s 100,000 times more likely to kill us than whatever made that mess on the six o’clock news.

The dictionary defines terrorism as:

“the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear”

American Psychological Association (APA):
terrorism. (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved February 08, 2008, from Dictionary.com.

So, what is it when a slab of white meat like Romney lets loose with a lunger like the one he showcased at the Conservatives’ Ball yesterday, as he headed back to his old job of selling off pieces of American companies to the global plutocracy as salvage? What’s being implied by the statement -

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Connecting the prospect of a DNC victory in the fall with surrendering to terrorists? Reminds me of when Cheney warned that if we were stupid enough to vote the GOP majority out of either house of Congress in 2006, that some of us would pay the ultimate price for doing so as victims of terror attacks in this country. Now, THAT actually sounded a lot like a direct threat. Good thing he runs the law enforcement branch of the government. If a guy like me made that threat in public, they’d be using my nuts to test DieHard batteries in a black room at GitMo right now.

So, Where’s the Terror in America?

It’s all around us. It’s crisscrossing invisibly through the air that embraces us enveloped in AM and FM carriers, it’s leaping out at us in our living rooms and screaming at us from the dashboards of our cars as we sit in traffic. It lies folded to the asphalt of our driveways as we stumble out of bed to greet yet another day of the closest that mankind will ever get to paradise on earth.

It’s paid for by the same folks who brought us the Iraq Invasion, the War on Terror, the NSA spy scandal, the massive exodus of skilled and career jobs to parts of the world where EPA is pronounced ”eepah?”, and the real terror of knowing that if cancer were to strike anywhere in our family, that it’d bring with it the end of our one chance of having what’s been sold to us as a our American birthright – a dignified existence. 

Anyone that believes that terrorism is restricted to the violence that initiates the terrorism process is missing the most powerful weapon in the terrorists’ arsenal. That weapon is the threat of violence. The direct and intentional implication of that threat. The constant feeding of that fear that causes people to make decisions that might not be in their best interest, but are definitely in the best interest of those making the threats. That marketing campaign that follows the bomber, putting the horror into proper perspective for the folks being targeted by the terrorists, is what terrorism is really all about.

It’s like the old gangs in NYC, who took down one guy’s business real hard as an example to the rest that they’d best get a rent check together each month to avoid any further tragedies in the neighborhood. Only this is even better, because these folks never had to get their hands dirty to begin with. All they ever needed to do was point at the tragedy and carry the threat part of the campaign forward. Then again, as the old gangs got better at what they did, the ugly stuff was delegated to the hired help. Even crooks get some structure after a while. It’s just the way things go as a business matures.

Think about it.  Are the casualties of the bombing itself the targets of the terror? If so, then where is the gain for the terrorist? Those people are dead. There is nothing to be gained from them. It’s the living - those who are left after the attack - who are the real target of the terror campaign. These folks are the ones who must now be manipulated by the rollout stages of the terror campaign to ensure a productive return on what was sacrificed in the initial stage of the campaign. It is the careful handling of these people, the careful nurturing of their fear, and then the bottom-line call-to-action item – whether it be political advantage, wholesale public policy changes, or a good old fashion raid on the National Treasury – that is the true goal of the terror campaign. Without that, nothing is achieved as the initial attack drifts into the collective history of a society – as does anything else of significance.

Three thousand people died as a result of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the Christmas Day tsunami in Indonesia and the surrounding area. The world at large has been more horrified by the terror attacks, and even now feel more fear of terrorism than of natural disaster, even though they are far more likely to be killed by a natural catastrophe than by a terrorist act. This has more to do with the steady marketing of that 9/11 terror event by the governments that wage the “War on Terror” than it has to do with any other single factor.

So, in the end, who is really terrorizing America? Maybe someone needs to look into that.