tim!: Love in the Time of Terrorism 2002 I have just come in from out-of-doors. I am flush and thick with sweat. Being outdoors in August in North Carolina before 4pm is for the insane and the pure of heart. I have been weeding. This is my ritual, my catharsis. As a child, I would often assist my Mom in gardening duties - which pretty much means weeding. Never really enjoyed it. Then again, not many pre-teens enjoy physical labor. What really got to me was the idea of getting dirty without having any fun. Now I crave the process of getting dirty and then clean again. It makes you feel like you've really accomplished something of worth.
My weed of choice lately has been the Ivy plant. Oh no you say, Ivy is so beautiful, look how it covers those bricks on that olde campus building. Ivy is evil. Evil in it's purest form. I'll give you the aesthetic qualities. It does look rather pretty. It's only once you get close to it that the evil shows its black heart. Ivy and ivy related plants spread both horizontally and vertically. Quite ingenious, really. What they start to do to the beautiful brick foundation is get all up in it, in-between the cracks, and start to mess with the integrity of the foundation. This is bad for the homeowner.
As the homeowner, it has become my personal declaration of war to seek out this pestilence, this disease, and put it into the brown yard-waste receptacle. I realized while out there, tearing the root-system out by the handful, that my motivation is not one of saving the foundation so much as it is to provide me with a process for mental cleansing.
The challenge is to find the Mother Root. The heart of the beast. I visualize the Mother Root tapping into the heart, just under the surface, yet out of my reach. There is no wrong root to start with, they all lead to the same place. The trick is to gently pull the root out without breaking it before you get to the next piece on the chain. The first instinct is to rip and tear at the roots in a fury of motion, throwing handfuls and handfuls of root pieces and stems onto the ground. What I learned today is that the satisfaction of finding that main line and gently coaxing it from the ground is as good as it gets in the world of weeding.
It's almost as if you have convinced the weed that you are its friend and that you are here to help; even though all the while, the curse words and insults are flowing as freely from your mouth as the sweat is from your brow. Terms such as, "son of a whore", and, "who's your daddy?", take on special meaning. Different somehow in the hot Sunday sun as your knees buckle and you use the side of the house for support.
Once that first vine is traced several feet from its origin, each moment brings new joy as the root yields to your trembling hands. I actually cried out in delight after one such battle was won, repeating over and over again - "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I started seeing flashes of light and hearing voices from the onset of dehydration-induced dementia, before reaching the sweet Mother Root. I think it will take more than my able hands to get that one out. My thought was this: This is going to take poison. I will have to poison this root and all living things near it in order to win the war. Rot it out from the inside. My thoughts then drifted off toward an analogy between weed root systems and terrorism.
We (the United States) are going about this whole terrorism thing all wrong. What we are doing now is payback. But thus far, our payback has been unsatisfactory. Sure we got that Afghan wedding taken care of, kicked the hell out of them. But they were only a minor threat. Once we get our ya-ya's out, it will be time to actually get some terrorists and not just innocent civilians.
I happen to know for a fact that both Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense) and Condolezza Rice (National Security Advisor) are frequent visitors to the Happyrobot site, and of my web-log thing. So - Donald, Condolezza, this is for you, and it is free. You don't even need to give me credit.
The U.S. is not using its most valuable resource in the War on Terror. The U.S. military machine, while impressive in its power to destroy, is not our best tool. The best tool is money. We have a lot of it. It's quite unbelievable, really. And so we have our terrorists who are apparently not subject to the wily devil in capitalism - hating it so much that they feel the need to blow up things, themselves included. And this just isn't good for anyone. What we need to do is bribe them to give up terrorism. We can't bribe what's-his-name, he's already a Saudi Prince or something. Even though he is continually on-the-road, surely he has an ATM card or stops by the Western Union from time to time.
We'd have to bribe the underlings, the poor bastards who do the dirty work to bring about the fall of capitalism. These are the guys who have $50 in their bank accounts and who get their satisfaction from that whole maniacal religious thing. Ah yes, this is all fine and well, but, give them say $100M each, and I think they'll see things differently. Take them to Vegas, show them a nice time. Then cut them a check and send them on their merry way; so long as they promise to stop it with all the sneaking around.
First of all - once they realize how much you can do with $100M, they'll forget all about that OBL guy and go buy an island. Secondly, after they spend $50M of the $100M, they will suffer a crisis of conscience, complete with mental breakdown, rendering them useless as minions and martyrs. The end result is an end to all this terrorism talk, and we can get back to our individual lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness. Whatever that means.
