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It Strikes Me...

That Osama is Laughing
February 7, 2004

I wonder if Osama the Carefully Hidden has a television in his spider hole. Given the (supposed) rigors of his life these days he could certainly use a laugh, and nothing has been funnier recently that watching the Americans fall all over themselves with self-righteous indignation over the nanosecond glimpse of Janet Jackson�s free range breast.

Investigations are being launched. Heads will roll. Janet is being punished, dropped from her next gig (though not the vacant Justin, the one who, after all, opened the fabric gate and freed the beast � er � breast). The whole country is up in arms. How dare someone damage the integrity of that sacrosanct event, the Super Bowl, with something so tawdry! After all, the all American spectacle of really large, steroidal men beating the crap out of each other for the entertainment of millions of alcohol infused couch potatoes is not to mocked.

The irony is almost unbearable. How many of those couch potatoes, or the athletes for that matter, must have been breast fed as children? How terrifying that must have been for them. Were they first fed then beaten with their mother�s breasts? What else could instill such fear in so many people? Surely someone will make that connection soon, and the drive will be on to label breastfeeding as child abuse and outlaw the practice.

Bin Laden must be howling. Janet and Justin have, in a single moment, accomplished more in the shutting down of Western freedoms than all the blood he and his brain washed minions have spilled in years. Bin Laden is laughing because he understands that fear, but he also understands that the fear is not of a bit of bare flesh but of the whole person. Women terrify Bin Laden and his followers. They are property, to be used as necessary, disciplined according to divine sanction, slaughtered if they step out of place.

It is clear that women terrify a lot of the Western world, too, including a lot of women themselves. Many of those fear-filled are currently in power in the United States, the Bushes among them, and they long for the clarity of a world in which everyone knows his place. Yes, his place. From paternal, vengeful God to paternal head of the family, the proper order of the universe is male first, male honour second, women not at all. Those who defy that order should burn in Hell, or on earth if the fanatics get them before Death rescues them.

This Bin Laden knows, and hence his crusade. The Christian version of that proper universal order has been, in his eyes, corrupted. For him only devout � read brutally militant � Islam can save the world. Christians would disagree, including the current, born again US President. Bush and his like would be happy to set the world straight, to force women back into the home, to cover them up decently. They may even secretly envy a way of life in which women are covered from head to foot for most of their adult lives, where women are not educated, but are wholly devoted to that paternalistic order � as long as it is done in the Christian way.

For those people the Super Bowl incident offers a chance to move in that direction, to slap down the immorality they see every day, to try and gain some yardage they have ceded steadily for the last forty years and more. Frankly, it�s a wasted effort. Jackson�s momentary freedom may cause a brief backlash, but the game is lost.

Bin Laden is laughing, not because he sees the moment as another example of corruption � he knows that game is lost in the West, even if so many Western leaders don�t � but because of the pathetic self-righteous response. To him it is a sign of the disarray of his enemy. He didn�t need another example of Western corruption to rally his troops, but he can always use a sign of weakness.

The last effective British presence in the Middle East routed the Yemenis, but the Brits have long since given up the empire game. The Russians ran from Afghanistan, the Israelis from southern Lebanon, the Americans from Vietnam and Somalia. Russia is bogged down in Chechnya, and the Brits and the Americans have largely satisfied themselves with forays into such military hotspots as the Falklands and Grenada. Carter blanched at the sight of a few bodies in the desert and turned away from his own people in Iran. Clinton fled from Somalia at the sight of a single corpse being dragged through the streets. The two Bushes may have beaten up on Iraq, but then Saddam was not really a Muslim, and anyway, Iraq is an easy target. If the Americans had any real stomach, all of their armies would be in Afghanistan � Iraq is just a cover to avoid taking on Bin Laden and his faithful.

Weakness, any weakness, anything that can be twisted into a sign of weakness, brings recruits to the battle against the West. Bin Laden and his followers fear and hate women, but they know how to deal with women who get out of line. In Afghanistan, at least under Sheikh Omar and Bin Laden, Jackson would have been dragged to a public space, buried up to her waist and stoned to death, mostly by other women. The hue and cry that is echoing in the States, the fact that Jackson walks free, is symbolic of Western weakness. Having become a symbol himself, Bin Laden knows the potency of that.

If Bin Laden does have a tv in his hole, I hope he enjoys all the sanctimonious crap that is still filling American media over the Super Bowl. It may make him cocky, and maybe then he would push ahead a strike without the careful planning that seems to lie beneath his usual work � such uncharacteristic rashness could lead to his downfall.

Of course it would be better for everyone if someone accidentally parked a tank on trap door of Bin Laden�s hidey-hole and left it there. But that�s just wishful thinking.

 

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