Joy to the World
People the world over sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf—George Orwell
James Versluys
As of this writing, Kunduz has 20,000-odd Taleban and AlQaeda fighters, and it is one of the last strongholds of the Mohammedan scourge directly responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers. Glorious hatred rears its head, and I am filled with life. This is how the Nordic hordes felt, how I felt in one of the little mass fights I engaged in when I was young.
I haven't been much good for the last few days, to my woman or anyone else. My mind has wandered to the people I know personally who went down that hellish September day. I find my mind wandering from them to the human beings who are being carpet bombed in Kunduz right now, and I think, this is how life can be its best. Their pain is better than drugs. I've never felt particularly patriotic in my adulthood, but here I sit, captive to old stirrings. No fool knows what will happen next, and the Taleban hold parts of the country still. But the glorifying horrible deaths brought to the Mohammeda-Nazi's needs no further justification. If Afghanistan falls into even worse chaos, it is worth it. We are not making more Bin Ladens, we are killing thousands of them. At this exact moment, the sounds of glory come from the lazy arc of a B-52 circling for another run at Kunduz. "Go With God", a humorous atheist air mechanic wrote on a bomb.
Even before September 11th, convulsions were taking place, and the excruciating phrase "the world has changed" was merely a hastening of that central fact. The world was already splitting, twisting, transmogrifying out of recognizable shape. The Left looks...gone. Even ten years ago, the Left was an identifiable entity, but no more. They are riven and there will be no going back. The Right survives because it never was an identifiable entity; until now the Right has been seen as anything that wasn't the Left. Thus the Left, bereft of its credibility, is now no longer the holders to the key, and rightists now vie for control of the political landscape. Interesting times, interesting times. I am...happy. This really is an old feeling.
My mind flits over the political scene. Mohammedans in America seem precarious, at least from a long-term view. The national Security State is ramping up, led by a frontal assault from a very stern John Ashcroft. Short-term pogroms by the citizenry are not the Mohammedans’ problems, unlimited wiretapping is, or at least the beginning of it. I do not care for Arabs as a whole or Islam as a religion, despite their obviously superior qualities to the average American. Carnage for them would not cause a tear to welt in my eye. Where there is concern in my mind is where the Security State can be ramped up for everyone. Concern for them is concern for me. If they can do it to the Moor, they can do it to me just as easily the next time I idly pop out a banned political word, so my idle concern comes not for them, but for the country as a whole. I throw my lot in with the Arab-Americans, and behind Darrell Issa (R-CA), as a preventative of my own skin, and yours. Protecting their skin color protecting my own skin.
As to Arab-Americans themselves, my political attentions also fall on unimaginable political hypocrisy. They complain, although almost nothing happened to them. A long time ago, even as a leftist, reflexive defense of the colored in the sickness of identity politics made me retch. Moving rightward has done nothing to lessen that tendency. Molly Ivins spares no expense condemning Americans for a hysteria that exists nowhere in the general populace. A breathless report from Miss Ivins informs me that "the misguided zeal of our most pinheaded patriots has already led to attacks on individuals and mosques." Actually, there has been a virtual dearth of
this kind of behavior. Molly Ivins is a grown woman, and should know this. The truly horrific incidents are so few among our millions they can all be spotted by name.
"Since Sept. 11, Arab-Americans have not only been physically attacked but also harassed, discriminated against, fired because of their ethnicity and treated shabbily in a variety of ways, up to and including being rounded up and held on the flimsiest imaginable grounds."
It's Vlad The Impaler rounding up the poor Mohammedans all over again to be put at the end of pikes, according to this round of propaganda. The truth of the story is far more alarming. Since September 11th, crime has dropped precipitously, a trend that has only been slightly less marked among people of Middle Eastern descent. There is a joke about media hype that has a plane crashing into a chemical facility near a crowded school: "Michael Jackson, 10,000 Others Killed In Accident."
This is Miss Ivins take- "Arab and Sikh, 700 other murders occur in October" (not a real quote, but it's what she meant). A real headline by a decent human being would be thoroughly congratulatory, lauding Americans for their baffling decency throughout the whole affair. In no other country would an identifiable physical and religious minority have been treated so well. Statistically, anti-Arabism doesn't exist, with random incidents including even the most mild rebuke numbering in the mid-hundreds. So every one of the thousands of stories you've read about that single poor man who got shot by the anti-Muslim makes mockery of the hundred normal deaths that have occurred from mundane reasons since that time.
His ethnicity and the stupidity of his attacker are no worse than a million other murders. I say to all Mohammedans- your lives are worth no more than my friend who died in a fistfight some half a decade ago. Your plight deserves no more national attention than his warranted, which is to say, none. My private grief should be like yours should be, but isn't: private. You neither deserved nor earned the empathy of millions of Americans any more than my friend earned that empathy. I will recant this for any Mohammedan who can name my friend who died and can prove he publicly lamented his death. To all Muslims, I care for your co-religionist as much
as you cared for him.
The "cold shoulders", which are the main complaint Muslims whine about, are nothing, a slight breeze in throes of time. I care nothing if someone calls you a name. This is a free country, you're adults, and anyone can sneer at a head of rags and a mind in tatters. Much of what has come under the aegis of your victim politics is merely the policing of very useful questioning. The Moslem communities have escaped all the savage attacks on idiotic religions of the last 50 years, and it looks as if they are successfully avoiding good questions and reasonable attacks even now. How lucky brown skin privilege is when it's tea and question time! Rest assured, my countrymen will ask you no tough questions. Rest assured bland pronunciamentos about the "religion of peace" will outweigh serious questions of Islamic veracity by at least a margin of ten to one. That sound you hear is my sneering.
thetexasmercury.com |
