What cowards! I’ve never seen anything like it. Send in the Marines to bomb ’em–or what’s left of ’em from ’91 — back to the stone-age.
Bomb a city that was erected thousands of years ago and has endured countless Saddams, but only one U.S. of A. Bomb the hospitals where children receive aspirin for cancer–if they’re lucky–and old men, who’d be candidates for quadruple by-pass in New York, might have their hearts massaged before they stop. “Dual use” nitro-glycerin pills, balm to hearts in pain, became, under sanction , or perhaps just bad translation, “bombs on the heartland’s planes.” Blast the widows hanging laundry. Smoke the lanky shepherds’ goats.
But of course, we weep like the sky is falling when the sky is falling. When death comes from above — to us; when our towers fall and our thousands die, and centuries-old New York staggers to its feet, bewildered, front teeth shattered, and cries for “Justice,” which the President, heretofore branded with a scarlet asterisk (due to his questionable ascent to power) interprets as “Vendetta!”
The asterisk mysteriously fell off Dubya’s letter cardigan and he grew bold. He even visited New York for a day and led the cheers for “U-S-A! U-S-A!” As if it were 1980 again and the Russians were still worth beating, or better yet, our alleged ex-boozer and failed CEO was the star of the show this time, first-string Quarterback and not the sideline cheerleader he’d been at Yale. Once it grew dark, of course, he high-tailed it out of town, our Ground Zero Groupie, while his on-camera pals, the workers, went on with the wretched task of cleaning up what remained of the Pylons that once graced greeting-cards from here to Timbuktu. Oh, and pulling fleshy matter from tangles of debris–they did that too.
Well, Bush Inc. certainly showed those Afghans. Those Tally Bans. The nerve of them dressing up women like lampshades and letting Hitler hide out in fortified luxury caves ? la Fred Flintstone! The Evildoers must be dead by now, after all those booby-trap snack-packs dropped from heaven like care packages from the Sumerian Sky God himself (Hey, wasn’t Iraq in Sumeria or near Sumeria, or thereabouts? Oh, never mind).
But maybe the Evil Doers survived. It’s hard to tell with so many body parts scattered about like…body parts (shades of Ground Zero, no?) and all those weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and what have you. What did they expect, firing rifles in the air, like Appalachian mountain-folk, like bumpkins? Take somebody’s eye out with one of those things. Imagine Brave Pilot Johnson coming home with a glass eye, or no eyes. I’ve Zero Tolerance for casualties — on our side — though it’s embarrassing sometimes, these shooting-fish-in-a-barrel wars. Death from above. Way, way above.
Anyway it won’t be like that with our old, nemesis, Saddam, and the Iraqis, fighting for their very lives. Of course we’ll have to soften ’em with air mail. True, Baghdad stood for millennia, and they even mentioned it on “I Dream of Genie”–more than once, in fact–it was that famous, but don’t you worry, we’ll grind it fine as Espresso roast before we dare send in our boys…
But again, you never know with these terror types. You don’t know where they’ll hide or what weasel hole they’ll pop out of and BLAM! Like Viet Cong (remember them?)…
But that was many men on the moon ago. Things changed. We have the technology. We can make them better than they were. Better, whiter, more democratic. After we blast their brains all over the Gulf and wicked old Saddam screams “Uncle Sam!” in Arabic, just like we did with that other guy, the guy who looked like Charlie Manson. The guy who murdered thousands of innocents, September 11, 2001…
Wow, it seems like another life ago, with all that’s happened on the News this year. A lot of oil under the bridge, and in and out of Enron. We’ve been laden with too much info-data and detail, I think. Because, not only don’t I remember the giant, bearded Evil-doer, captured and in chains, screaming “Uncle Sam!” in Arabic, I hardly remember him at all.
I don’t even recall his name.
ADAM ENGEL writes and lives in NYC. His most recent and engaging project was providing editorial consultation for the book, She Comes First: A Grammar of Oral Sex, by Ian Kerner. He supports a war on terror because fear is a bad thing and should be eliminated, so long as nobody get’s hurt in the process. He can be reached at asengel@attglobal.net.