Major Acid's E-Rag
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.
