Culture Freak Special Edition:
The War on TERROR™

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than
it ceases to be serious when people laugh." - George Bernard Shaw

 

     My graduate classes are at Baruch College, the City University of New York (CUNY).  On my way to school the other day, I saw two incidents of New Yorkers yelling at each other in the street over parking spaces or whatever nonsense. "Things are returning to normal," I thought.  Baruch is across the street from a New York State Armory which, for a time, was being used as a registration center for relatives of the missing people in the World Trade Center.  Every building for blocks is covered with photographs and bios of the missing (dead) from the WTC attack.  For a split-second I thought "I should make one of these flyers with me on it." It would be an old-school Mike Freak art-prank. But it was only a fleeting, split-second thought.  Even I knew that this wouldn't be funny.  Still, the fact that I thought of it helped me realize, "things are definitely returning to normal." A couple years ago, I prepared a bunch of files that purported that Osama bin Laden had joined many other rich men in an attempt to circumnavigate the earth in a hot air balloon.  For reasons I don't remember, I never posted it. I gotta find that stuff and put it up now.

     Yes, after a two-week hiatus, my sense of humor is returning, but my sense of taste is more sober than before, I think.  Anyway, the following Associated Press photo appeared in a BBC news report on BBC.CO.UK/news.

 

     

     Well, Mullah Zaeef may come from the moderate wing of the Taleban movement, but the dude on the left apparently comes from the "Arrgh, I be a pirate in a Terry Gilliam film" wing of the Taleban movement.  Come on, from an American perspective (yes, I concede my heritage and subsequent prejudices), could this guy be any more like the cartoon vision of the evil, swarthy, devil man from days gone by? On a serious note, I can't help but believe that someone very carefully chose this picture BECAUSE that dude on the left looks so crazy.  There are plenty of photos of Mullah Zaeef to choose from.  I can't help but think someone chose the most cartoony one available to bolster public opinion against this regime.  This is Batman shit! Speaking of which, check this out. This photo also appeared in the same article. 

     "The situation is volatile and dangerous." So dangerous in fact, that this man is kissing a picture of Osama (or Usama, if you prefer) bin Laden!  Again, as an American, this photo seems so ridiculous that I can only perceive the man in the picture as being ridiculous.  Further, again, I believe that someone WANTS me to feel this way.  You know, that whole dehumanizing the enemy thing.

     The world has returned to its "normal" insanity. I just saw a construction worker compare the World Trade Center site to scenes from the movie, "Planet of the Apes." I understand the Armegeddon concept. But it concerns me that Americans always seem to compare reality to to fantasy.  On the day of the WTC attack, I watched one reporter exclaim that the scene of the plane hitting the second WTC tower looked "almost like animation."  Yeah, that's because you're an American and you can only see things through your visions of fantasy entertainment.  If one good thing came out of this attack (and it is likely the only good thing), it's that Americans were shaken out of their fantasy world.  I wonder how long our sobriety will last.