Here He Goes Again!

I don't write for my blog nearly as much as I used to. I still enjoy writing, but I seem to have lost the zest for it that sent me there with a reasonably lengthy think-piece every few days.

Those of you who read my blog know that I have a hard-on over matters of religion and conservative politics, and that I have lived in the Middle East a couple of times for a total of about four years, but never in Israel. Some woman who warned me that, "If we let 'them' get away with 'this', soon we would be living in a world where all women would be in purdah," had also lived three years in the Middle East, but nowhere besides Israel. I understand her paranoia as an American Jew. She is loyal to the symbols of her culture, ignorant of the fact that others are as deeply sincere about just the opposite, and almost totally without coherent information about world affairs.

I've almost finished Reza Arslan's latest book on Cosmic Wars. (I forgot the full name of the book; just google his name and when you see the book with Cosmic Wars in the title, you're there.) He describes a statement made by Osama bin Laden—supreme leader, along with Ayman Zawahiri, of Afghanistan-Pakistan border-limited terrorism, which is pretty much a niche market I'd say. Anyway, Osama said that al-Qaeda recruits its martyrs (read suicide bombers) from Muslim youth between 15 and 25 years old. Why ask why… the answer's so obvious!

That's the age group that has no social power, little personal influence, is generally unmarried, is generally early in a career or bored by being a student or working in someone's shop, and is in the process of personal psychological and social formation—an unfinished work! It was those same kids who took flight lessons in Florida and ran their hijacked planes into American hearts and minds. It's the same kids who blew up a bus in London (known as the 7/7 bombing, similar to our 9/11). That's why the old farts—bin Laden and Zawahiri—are alive and living in a well appointed cavern. You don't think a grown man or woman would consciously blow himself up for an abstraction, do you?

Here, the grown men and women kill others, like they're supposed to, not themselves. No abortion doctor is safe, but the shooters of abortion doctors are! Nope, here no self-sacrifice accompanies the sacrifice. When Abraham was told by God—God, mind you, not some dude with a misguided sense of justice (although I wouldn't want to be God's lawyer on this one)—to sacrifice his son, God didn't tell him to grab his kid and jump into a house fire holding on!

God, in a tremendous gesture of punch-line deftness, actually "punked" old Abraham by replacing Jacob with an animal before Abraham could kill him. After breathing a huge sigh of relief and sacrificing that fucking goat, I can imagine the laughter that Abraham and Jacob had! "Oh, that Yah---! He's something else, man. All that time I thought I was going to have to kill you, Jacob!" "Yeah, Pops, me too!" God was harder on his own kid, but that's only right, I guess.

Maybe what we need to do is blanket the internet with Pink Floyd and the Who. Maybe if we saturate the world's youth with lyrics like, "Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!" or "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss," we can develop enough skepticism so that they end up believing in nothing! It worked for me!