Mohammed al Jones agreed to meet to discuss the terrorist threat in America. Naturally we met somewhere he felt safe, so we settled on his garage where he held weekly neighborhood poker games.
I noticed some suspicious-looking items on his workbench.
“Legos,” he said. “One of my kids is working on a school project. Motorized Legos. I think he’s building an up-armored Humvee replica.”
Relieved, I said, “So what can you tell me about terrorism in America.”
“It’s rampant. There’s no place in America untouched by it, except maybe my garage.”
“But you’re a terrorist…”
“I even have a card.” He pulled a red pasteboard card from his wallet. It said ‘Certified Terrorist’. “Like it? I made it myself on the computer.”
I asked for one that said ‘Certified Cat Lover’. He said he’d have it tomorrow.
“If terrorists are everywhere,” I said, “how can we identify them?”
“Oh, goodness, they’re all over the television. They’re on cable all the time. They even come to your door. Uninvited, of course.”
“To my door? How can that be?”
“Those little old ladies from Jehovah’s Witnesses are frightening. You tell them to go away and they send more. You have to pay them off.”
“I pretend I’m not home.”
“See? Trapped. And then there’s all the others. The NRA. They want to arm your children. Can you imagine? Pre-hormonal fifth graders, armed, in class.”
“That is terrifying.”
“And Nazis. You do know you have Nazis parading around the country, right?”
“They’re harmless, I’m sure.”
“They worship Hitler. They carry guns. They want to overthrow the government. They hold meetings in basements.”
“I hadn’t thought of them that way.”
“You have skinheads and militias. Skinheads beat people and threaten the livelihood of barbers everywhere. Militias practice military tactics out in the woods. With guns. They don’t like anybody but they want to overthrow the government and run things themselves.”
“I can’t imagine what that would be like.”
“Think Nazi. And think Tea Baggers.”
“Like Lipton?”
“No, like the crazies this past summer. They’re completely disconnected from reality, they make insane threats. They create an atmosphere that justifies violence against the people they hate.”
“Democrats?”
“And black people and Muslims and French people. They don’t like anybody who’s not as crazy as they are. They worship that Bachmann woman from Minnesota. She’s nutty as a walnut orchard. You want to feel scared? Walk through a crowd of those people while you look calm and intelligent. They’ll tear you to pieces.”
“That’s a lot of terrorists, I guess. Anyone else?”
“Sure. How about those four nutcases on the Supreme Court. Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia. Those guys are really scary.”
“But they’re judges. They’re rational people.”
“How long before those rational judges put the country back into the nineteenth century? Everybody’ll be walking around with guns. Corporations will be immune from lawsuits and will run the country even more than they do now. Your kids will be taught in science class that the earth is four thousand years old. You owe money, you go to jail. How’s that for terror?”
“I may have to move overseas,” I said.
“Won’t help. America’s got over seven hundred military bases around the world. They want it all. They want to call the shots and do the shooting.”
“What can we do?”
“Not too much. You people hardly even vote. You don’t pay attention to facts and evidence, and if you did you wouldn’t know how to figure out the truth about anything because you never learned how in school. Twenty percent of you think the sun revolves around the earth. Over half of you think your god created the earth in six days and played golf on the seventh day. Most of you think the scientists are lying about global warming.”
“Doesn’t sound too good.”
“These aren’t the kind of people who can create a rational, sensible government that takes care of its people and relates intelligently with the rest of the world.”
“Do you have any solutions? Besides blowing things up.”
“Blowing things up was a hobby for me. You have serious bombers. Timothy McVeigh. The abortion clinic bombers and doctor killers. Religious fanatics. They do it for real.”
“They get caught though.”
“They’re crazy or stupid. But what you have to do here isn’t as easy as blowing things up. You have to rein in CEO salaries, for one thing. This is America. It’s not supposed to have princes and aristocrats. Look what Wall Street did, nearly brought down the global economy. No bombs. Just greed and Republicans refusing to regulate them.
“Your educational system teaches your kids to pass tests. You have to teach them to think, to think for themselves, to reason critically, to question, and to seek real answers to real problems.
“Stop denying reality. Global warming is here. It’s not going away. God isn’t going to stop it. You need a Manhattan Project to create a non-carbon energy economy, and to memorialize Manhattan which will be under water in a few decades.
“And jobs, you’ve got to get people working again. Never mind that religious crap. It’s jobs that are the opiate of the people.
“You’ve got a lot of work to do, but the intellectual resources you need to get it done don’t have any power to act. Your government would rather spend trillions fighting tiny threats overseas than deal with real, major threats at home.”
“But you don’t really think any of that will happen, do you?”
“Puh-leeze!” he said. “Besides, al-Qaeda already pulled the trigger on September 11.”
“And look where it got them. Hiding. On the run.”
“No. It got the United States to start self-destructing. They don’t have to do anything else. A few angry people here and there in America will eventually blow something up and you’ll go downhill from there, done in by your stupidity and mindlessness.”
“Is that your plan?”
“My plan? No, I have no plan. I retired when Bush got a second term. My work was done. Now I play poker. You want to play? We meet Friday night, right here.”
“Might as well,” I said. “Nothing but murder and terror and dumb news entertainers on the tube. I’ll bring the dip.”
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Thanks Mike. Well done. 8)
Reminds me of a Marxist John Galt…. brains railing against quiescent citizens who live for status quo.