Every day you go through life thinking you're accomplishing this or that, effecting change, making yourself and your will felt upon the world, you are actually the one being done.  The world is an empire, and all the dark and bright matter-energy out there twangs your superstrings (not to mention whatever chains deities are yanking), and plays you like recorded whale-wailing at an endangered species benefit.

  You can even see yourself as God’s puppet, and make it out to be an obdurate virtue, with you the hard hammer of manifest destiny. Supreme examples of this are Osama bin Laden and George Bush:  both men claim to be fervently faithful, each to his own God.  And both humbly believe they’re doing what God wants, because frankly, if they don't, God would smite them mightily. Not only them personally, but the millions of poor souls they rally.

When these men open their mouths and snore peacefully at night, it's because their consciences are clean. Their dreams are sweet, for they sleep certain God knows they're trying their best to execute his will, by egging on others to execute brothers.

"See that martyr caravan yonder?" they wake up and cry to their angry guys.  "Run join it!  I'd go too but I got to stay and point the way!  Hey can I get a little breakfast here?"

  In his latest video postcard to America, released September 11, bin Laden preaches that the only way out of the mutual slaughter is for America to ditch her Jesuswagen-wheels and upgrade to Islam, the Rolls Royce of all religions. Unless we do, he believes America is doomed to defeat and will collapse, much as the Soviet Union did after he and Allah kicked their buttockchkas out of Afghanistan.

 

George W. Bush

The wily Muhammadman is offering a surrender option he knows America will never accept. He's already lured us to his side of the world to watch us bleed. Nonetheless, could it conceivably ever be fruitful to face him head-on, yet get just close enough to read his lips? (Check out the dark beard, bet he dyes it himself.)

What if some rainy day we learned a little Arabic and spent quality time at least trying to listen to our enemy? Suppose we spiritually sought to divine why bin Laden, like our inflaming Bush, sees his holy duty to be urging his own people to die - which they do so zealously - before we decide to utterly obliterate him, them, and collaterally thousands more innocent than bad men, women and children?

    For his part, even though he probably lives in a cave, bin Laden reportedly reads widely and watches Larry King and CNN, between prayers.

  In fact, in his 9/11/07 message, bin Laden specifically identified some Americans he feels have correctly understood him and his motivations.  One was Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of such books as Imperial Hubris, Through Our Enemy's Eyes, and most recently, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.

  After viewing the bin Laden video, Scheuer, on the Larry King Show, noted that "...what bin Laden said today was exactly what he's been saying for twelve years, that this war is not about elections or liberties, democracy or women in the workplace. It's about the impact of our policies in the Islamic world. And because we won't talk about that here in America, we're not adequately defended."

  Scheuer contends that bin Laden's rationale is profoundly misunderstood by Bush and most American politicians, who strive to paint our nemesis as a sociopathic evildoer, without much on his mind other than a heap of hate for our God and way of life, and wanting jealously to destroy our precious "civilization."

Then, by responding so fiercely in what we see as righteous self-defense, we turn ourselves into the very Satan that bin Laden and his followers consider us to be: a malignant, devious Mafia that kills and tortures and extorts to spread its power, then goes home to the wife and kids for a nice dinner, like Tony Soprano.    And have we not indeed done these very things?  This has always been our way, has it not?  One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all, no matter how many we have to subdue, snuff, or squeeze till they squeal, to make it just so?

  Verily, when humanity was still in infancy – and Yahweh was evidently working through his own unbridled youth – Jesus’ Dad frequently commanded the Israelites to brutally mutilate and cleanse away entire tribes of infidels, along with every living thing in the same neighborhood.

Infidels were folks who simply hadn’t heard about Yahweh, unfortunately, or who had but preferred their multiple, nuanced gods to the single-minded egomaniac the Hebrews worshipped and murdered for.

  Likewise, prior to the war in Iraq, bin Laden was seen by most Muslims in the Middle East as an extremist. Now, America’s behavior has made him virtually a Mujahadeen Hall of Fame prophet, whose predictions we tragic heroes continue to play out.

  "The war in Iraq broke our back in terms of coping with and keeping contained the Islamist problem," said Scheuer. "We, unwittingly, I hope, fulfilled the predicate for a defensive jihad. We're an infidel power that invaded a Muslim country unprovoked, and then occupied it and tried to put in secular laws. It's exactly - according to the Koran - the responsibility of Muslims in that situation to respond violently against the occupier."

  Wittingly, of course, many American capitalists have profited immensely from that perfect storm/opportunity in the sand.

  But perhaps we could achieve far more important, truly worthy profits, precisely by trying less to profit at all – the bad habit by which, generation after generation, we dupe ourselves into "defending freedom"? 

The devil does love to dig in our backyard, and behold how he fills his swimming hole with blood siphoned from Iraq -  while we drive our trucks and Hummers to Walmart, wishing gas prices would go down.

Tell us what you think. Write Spectrum at editor@mcckc.edu.

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