When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden Part 2

Crazy Talk

It's important to remember as America focuses on the Arab world as our prime terrorist threat that just because other people aren't blowing themselves up to get at us, that's just lucky. Just lucky the African or Filipino or Mexican temperament-or religion or history or whatever-hasn't taken them in the "72 Virgins" direction, too, because the hate is present on every continent, and some of it is justified.

Here's one example: we've spent billions on something called Plan Colombia, which, if you're not familiar, allows you to get the first 12 CDs for just a penny. Actually, it's a scheme to address our mammoth c.o.ke jones by defoliating the coca fields of Colombia. We love c.o.ke, so you get agent-oranged-sound fair? U.S. planes have thus far showered defoliant on more than 200,000 acres, killing not just coca plants but entire ecosystems: damaging legitimate crops, poisoning water supplies, killing fish and livestock, uprooting entire villages, and causing people to suffer fevers, diarrhea, allergies and rashes.

And that's why they hate us: because, to keep drugs out of Bobby Brown's glove box, we kill peasants in Putumayo. If we did this kind of thing to the Arabs, they'd actually have the kind of beef with us that they think they do.

By the way-not that you probably couldn't have guessed this about a government plan-it doesn't work. When a coca field is successfully sprayed, of course the farmers simply move their operation to another valley, like a Whack-a-Mole game. Not to mention that we're sending military hardware and "advisors" into the middle of a convoluted civil war with two leftist guerilla armies fighting the government, right wing paramilitary forces fighting the guerillas, and civilians trapped in the middle. It's Vietnam in Spanish.

But hey, it's got to be done, because some of the plants that grow in the southern hemisphere are just plain evil. We know that because they're not stamped with labels like Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Eli Lilly or Pfizer. And it's vital that we understand that these southern hemisphere plants and their cultivators are to blame, because the alternative is to believe that our national appet.i.te for drugs is our own problem. And that's just crazy talk.

Like any addict, when it comes to the Drug War, the United States is in lull denial. What our posturing, moralizing leaders.h.i.+p pretends they don't know is that if it wasn't Colombian cocaine, it'd be Bolivian cocaine, and if it wasn't that it'd be homemade methadone or a forty or glue or stolen pills or pot or ecstasy. It'd be something, because the mind is a terrible place to be stuck sober. The Department of Stopping Fun can show me all the statistics in the world about how usage of a certain drug has dropped off, but what they never tell you is it's because people found something else. They always will. Whether you call it wine, women and song, or s.e.x, drugs and rock 'n' roll, humans like certain pleasures, and it's really not worth making whole countries hate us by "fighting" something so deep. People like to alter their mood, mostly because other people screw up the planet with dumb laws and dumb decisions that just make you have to do something at the end of the day.

The Man in the Sky

Having always defined political correctness as the elevation of sensitivity over truth and being an optimist, I guessed that after 9/11, Americans would judge all matters "PC" to be an indulgence herewith unaffordable. Boy, was I wrong.

Which is bad, because political correctness is much more dangerous now than it was before 9/11. What were once the kind of lies we told to spare anyone's "feelings" from ever getting bruised are now revealed as blind spots in our rationale, inhibiting our ability to fully grasp our predicament.

And there's nothing more politically correct than pretending religion is always a good thing. Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a rea.s.suring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical and, after a few gla.s.ses of wine, a freak in the bedroom.

People say "I'm a Christian" the way certain politicians say "I have integrity," like we're all supposed to be impressed and back off and kneel down to that almighty testament to naivete and hypocrisy. When people brag that they have religious faith, I hear "stupidity." Faith is saying, "I will ignore my G.o.d-given gifts for discerning reality and instead throw my lot in with blind belief in something that was forced into my head before I could even think."

Isn't that how we get adults in this world who fight wars based on which contrived fairytale they were brought up on? Which desert mirage they were programmed to see-the magic apple and the talking bush or the flying horse and circling the black rock?

But hey, "You have to respect people's religion!"

Why? I don't. I don't respect thinking that is dangerous, prejudicial, childish and could get me killed. And to pretend, as we are apparently supposed to, that the terrorism we face today is not about religion is like saying AIDS in America has no relation to h.o.m.os.e.xuality. It'll get you applause on Oprah, but it's not true. Also an applause line but complete bulls.h.i.+t is "this is not a clash of civilizations." Of course it is, as every major war is. The Civil War was a clash of civilizations, and we didn't even leave the country.

To hear people the week after 9/11 constantly talking up the need for more faith and the importuning of our G.o.d was, to me, the very definition of being "Part of the problem." Of course, we in the West like to pat ourselves on the back and say we're more tolerant, and we are-but tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance. It just means, "We think you're crazy and going to h.e.l.l, but we won't kill you for it-we'll tolerate you. But you don't know who the Man in the Sky is, and we do."

Our own president said during the 2000 campaign that he didn't believe one could get into heaven if not a Christian. He had to backpedal on it because non-Christians vote, but millions of Christians who aren't running for anything would endorse that view wholeheartedly.

And why wouldn't they, since they treat the Bible like it's some kind of... bible, and in it there are the words: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: and no man cometh unto the Father but by me." Not a lot of wiggle room there. Put that next to "There is no G.o.d but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet," and it's pretty much "pick a side." One lane open on the highway to heaven.

Of course, when you shut off your brain from rational a.n.a.lysis, any book is dangerous. Taking literally ancient parables from thousands of years ago is much more dangerous than playing with a loaded gun. Ancient scrawls, written by different authors in different centuries with different agendas-yeah, let's get madliteral about that.

The literalness problem is compounded in religion by the circular logic of not being allowed to question anything, or else you're lacking faith. Christianity and Islam both have strict bans on of any sort of questioning of the religion itself-or, as the wizard once put it, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" In the Bible, it's "Don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge," but the meaning is the same: "The stuff we're telling you is going to seem crazy, but just buy it."

Imagine being able to sell any other product like that-by insisting the Customer swallow every word you spoke about it as gospel or else he'd burn in h.e.l.l. Where you, as the customer, having been brainwashed from birth about the superiority of the product, upon reaching thinking age, forfeit the benefits of the product if you doubt it in any way, and the claims of the product cannot he tested until after you're dead.

Maybe that's why "Religion" is a magic word that allows priesthoods to do anything they want to people. The Taliban kept their women in beekeeper suits. The Catholics got away with f.u.c.king kids!

If Islam was seen as an ideology instead of a religion, it'd be easy to point a finger in the face of the enemy. But with a religion, no matter how vicious, it gets a little touchy, because, again, we'd hate to come off as intolerant. So we'd like to make it clear that this is a war on terror, and there's no need for us to go digging into exactly where all the hate is coming from.

But, if you must know, it's coming from the Koran or, more accurately, a conveniently literal interpretation of the Koran that informs the impoverished and the frustrated and the humiliated of their righteous duty to strike out, to kill, to wage jihad in the name of their G.o.d. The Koran's "Wherever you are, death will find you out, even if you are in towers built up strong and high," does not mean "fly planes into buildings" any more than the story of the tortoise and the hare means "rabbits are losers"-but it's religion, so we have to respect that, and take it literally.

My personal savior is common sense. And as far as G.o.d goes, I prefer to believe in one that would want me to use the excellent brain he gave us all.

The Oxygen of Terrorism

Until warfare becomes completely automated women will never do as much as men in war. Men are physically stronger, and so we need them out front and on the battlefield more. That's just reality, and any arguments to the contrary are politics.

But when called upon in America, women have given 100% of what they can give, which is enormous and essential. Just like in the workplace, women who are good workers are the best workers.

But give up diamonds? That's a gut check for women today, who might want to compare themselves to women of another generation, that of my mother, who was an Army nurse in World War II and never expected diamonds, let alone worried about giving them up.

Cohn Powell said, "Money is the oxygen of terrorism," which is Secretary of State talk for "It's all about the Benjamins." And terrorists don't use banks or securities, which are a.s.sets that can be frozen. They're crazy, not stupid. And they don't hide it under their mattresses-we've seen the caves. No, the bin Ladens of the world take their dirty oil money and convert it into dirty, untraceable things like diamonds. Diamonds are small, easily smuggled, not stopped by metal detectors and can't be identified by dogs-although they can be sniffed out by women from 1,000 yards: that's over nine football fields to you and me.

Not only are diamonds a perfect way for actually appreciate in value, SO the bad guys see a profit when they convert their diamonds back into cash. So, guys, when you're buying her that diamond to tell her "you'd do it all over again," you might be enabling the terrorists to do it all over again. A diamond may he forever, but terrorism, promiscuously funded, will be too.

Let's make the connection clearly by tracing the path of the diamond. Diamonds start out in the earth, and eventually that earth is part of a country, like Sierra Leone, Angola or the Democratic Republic of Congo. In those countries, desperate battles for control have been going on for decades, and the armies that fight the battles finance their ambitions with diamonds. Villagers are forced to mine the diamonds by ruthless rebels who maintain order through terror: by raping the women and hacking off the limbs of the children-something, by the way, you never see in the DeBeers ads. The rebels then smuggle the diamonds into neighboring dictators.h.i.+ps in exchange for guns and cash. There the diamonds are sold to the highest bidder-whether they be terrorists or "legitimate" dealers-and finally they're laundered in Europe, s.h.i.+pped to America, and end up in jewelry stores where they're purchased by men and given to women in exchange for oral s.e.x.

In the feminized nation we live in, it's practically national policy that women are more evolved than men-but if that's so, how come they're still so impressed by s.h.i.+ny objects? Women complain that men are mesmerized by big b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but unlike diamonds, which are a commodity, at least b.r.e.a.s.t.s are natural. Well, not so much in L.A., but in general.

I know, it's hard. Women think about diamonds like men think about s.e.x. Like leeches think about blood.

I once told a woman-who happens to he one of the nicest people ever, who only lives to help injured puppies and lonely children and old people-about the horrible situation in Africa with the diamonds. I told her about the rebels, and how they cut off the arms of children, all so they can control and sell diamonds.

My friend looked sad and forlorn. And then, in a tiny voice, she asked me: "Both arms?"

AW0L.

In the months following 9/il, many were labeled traitors by our government. "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, "American Al Qaeda" Jose Padilla, and "Senator" Tom Daschle. It was easy to point an accusing finger at the very apparent traitors, those who had taken up arms against this country or, worse yet, dared to question the administration.

But just off most of our radars and just off our sh.o.r.es lurk our not-so-apparent traitors, the U.S. companies who have set up shop in the Bahamas and elsewhere to avoid taxation. It's called "tax motivated expatriation"-a nice corporate phrase for "freeloading"-and it's a tax code loophole that allows U.S. companies to enjoy all the benefits provided by their government without the nuisance of having to pay for them. Like stealing, but without the masks.

Of course, these "American" companies don't actually have to move to the Bahamas, which just shows you how dumb they are: the money gets to live in the Caribbean, they stay in Newark. They just have to set up a P.O. box on the island-essentially a phone and a monkey, with some kind of mailbox to collect their dirty, b.l.o.o.d.y money.

And I do mean b.l.o.o.d.y. I'd bet that money, or the desire to keep it, has killed more American soldiers than the Iraqi army ever will. Folks of a certain age will remember a play, All My Sons, and I remember the movie on TV, with Edgar C. Robinson as the wartime airplane manufacturer who scrimps on the making of certain bolts that then cause planes to crash and pilots to die, among them his son. But, of course, too late he realizes they were all his sons.

That might have been a good movie to see for some of the folks running EaglePilcher, the maker of the batteries for our smart bombs, since employees have come forward to accuse the company of allegedly rigging computers to show live response from dead batteries, faking test reports, and gluing up cracks in battery casings to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which would have been great business savvy-"How does Vice President Martin sound?"-if the faulty batteries hadn't made the smart bombs dumb and caused the friendly fire deaths of several U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

But the corporate mindset in America isn't really that different from the mayor in Jaws. Yes, there's a shark out there, but don't tell people! Then the worst possible thing will happen, and we'll lose business!

It's practically our national credo: "What's good for business is good for America!" Well, no. Fraud can he good for business; sweatshops arc good for business; children work cheeeap! The tax cheats in the Caribbean who are AWOL (a.s.sholes With Official Leave) love to give you that malarkey about how, without the taxes, they can cut the cost of the product they're making. Yes, and slavery's a real cost-cutter, too. The Civil War was the original "it's the economy, stupid."

Besides, the money isn't really getting trickled down anyway. The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker salary in 1980 was 42. In 2000, that gap had grown more than tenfold, and a CEO made 531 times what the average worker does.

Rich people did very, very well in the last two decades-Reagan and Clinton were a golden one-two economic punch for the wealthy. But now it's time to give hack and not forget that that kind of wealth was only made possible because it was accrued in a country that, with all its flaws, is the envy of the world precisely because we have functioning government agencies, like the IRS, that allow people to conduct commerce. Without the S.E.C. and the Federal Reserve, not to mention the FBI and a kick-a.s.s army, the conditions for ama.s.sing wealth simply wouldn't exist. But some people always want to argue the bill. Even in wartime.

The IRS estimates that this offsh.o.r.e tax dodge siphons $70 billion each year from our U.S. Treasury, which is approximately our entire tab spent on the Terrorism War the first year.

The connection we have to make here is this: Politicians respond to pressure. If they don't think the people are outraged about something, it slips off their agenda. There are fundraisers to attend, lobbyists to entertain, and mistresses to screw. We have to let them know in Was.h.i.+ngton what makes us mad at home, and this kind of nonsense certainly should. Any idiot can win votes coming out against taxes-we all hate taxes, we all hate the IRS. But many nations would love to have an effective way of collecting legitimately needed tax revenue-and, unfortunately, with highway robberies like this, we're becoming one of them.

Neighbors Looking out for Neighbors

In many ways, 9/11 was like one giant school shooting, with those who felt persecuted and humiliated las.h.i.+ng out at their perceived bullies. Also, there was a lot of self-recrimination in American society afterward about the warning signs we should have seen. Arab men in flight school advertising that they didn't need to learn how to land the plane-that's the "making pipe bombs in the garage" for the terrorist set.

The hijackers lived amongst us without fear of being stopped before they struck, and that's pathetic on our part. Pathetic that after the first World Trade Center bombing and the second Steven Seagal movie about terrorists, vigilance was still neither asked for by the government nor volunteered by the people. The bad guys shared apartments with little or no furniture, and mouthed off about their plans when they got drunk on "virgin scouting trips" to strip bars. Although in all fairness, who knew in a strip club what they meant by "collapsed erections?"

Of course, you you could could say that hindsight is 20-20, and at the time America was concerned with much more pressing matters, like who'd say that hindsight is 20-20, and at the time America was concerned with much more pressing matters, like who'd win win Survivor, Survivor, the break-up of Anne and Ellen, and getting Gary Condit to give in and let us smell his finger. the break-up of Anne and Ellen, and getting Gary Condit to give in and let us smell his finger.

Luckily, it's officially a whole new world now. Just as Columbine ushered in a new era where it's okay for kids to rat on each other, taking seriously and reporting violent threats from fellow students, we all now have a duty to report suspicious activity. We get it now that the world is a dangerous place, and we can't tiptoe around national security.

If only. A few weeks after 9/11 and just before Halloween 2001, when there were official warnings about possible terrorist attacks on our malls and anthrax was the new AIDS, a retail store clerk in Hackensack, New Jersey noticed a "foreign-looking" man buying $7,000 worth of candy.

$7,000. That's a lot of treats. No one wants their lawn TP-ed, but come on.

So something in the clerk's brain-oh, let's call it reason and the human instinct to survive-superseded his indoctrination in politically correct America to die rather than risk offending someone, and he dropped a dime. The candy hulk-buyer was questioned and cleared by the FBI and sent on his way, his name never released-although a source tells me it was Wen Ho Lee.

Many, of course, went to the old playbook about the evils of profiling, as in pulling over a black guy because he's driving a Mercedes in East St. Louis is anything like having suspicions about someone buying $7,000 of candy right before Halloween when we're on high alert!

It's great to be color blind, and ethnic blind, and religious blind-but blind is blind. It means you can't see. I'd rather see and then judge, as opposed to cutting off the cognitive process quite so early. Why suppress what separates us from the lower forms of life that can't think and replace it with modes of non-reason, like political correctness, term limits or "zero tolerance?"

Look at the World War II posters: we used to he able to trust our citizens to be our eyes and ears. But then again, we used to have common sense, and hold it in some esteem. Political correctness is almost always the opposite of common sense. It's what has us pretending at the airport that Ray Charles is just as likely to blow up the plane as the guy with the bin Laden lunchbox. I'm not saying turn in everyone with an accent and a bad att.i.tude-we'd have no cab drivers. And I'm not suggesting that the government monitor our every move and habit. That's already being done by the credit card industry.

I'm just saying that it takes neighbors looking out for neighbors, and a postman pa.s.sing along the fact that at 180 Maplewood, the seven addressees all named Mohammed are building "something" in their living room. If it turns out to be just a pole for strippers they get back to the house (the 72 virgins is more likely), then at least we know they're just perverts, and not terrorists.

Like the lady said: it takes a village.

Dark By Choice

In his baby-on-the-tracks metaphor, ethicist Peter Singer maintains that, if given the choice between saving a third world baby or their new Mercedes, people in wealthy nations would save the Mercedes. Oh, we say we'd save the baby, but we remain willfully ignorant of the connections that make such disparate pleasures as diamonds and farm subsidies bad news for dirt-poor Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

Americans are very touchy about being called cheap and uncharitable. That we are the most generous of givers is a myth you disabuse at your peril, SO let me dive right in: Americans will give, but not very far from home, and it better have a good story or personal touch: Parkinson's research if Michael J. Fox gets it, Jerry's Kids after a three-day weekend of badgering, illegal immigrants if they're cute, age seven and their mom died on the trip over.

Giving new meaning to "me," Madonna once said: "AIDS is the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century," which I'm sure came as a surprise to a lot of Holocaust and cancer victims-but they didn 't have to keep replacing so many gay back-up dancers in the 8Os!

We don't feel for anything we have to reach too far to feel for-foreigners, animals, pot smokers-those causes are nowhere, have no power. I've heard many people say with a straight face, "Look how we helped Afghanistan."

Well, yeah, after we had a few buildings knocked down over here. Before that, I don't remember a lot of protests and b.u.mper stickers calling for the end of the Taliban thugocracy.

We give 0.01% in non-military foreign aid per year of our budget-dead last among the rich industrial nations, and less than Elton John's monthly Visa bill. The average voter, thinking foreign aid accounts for 15% of our budget, wants to cut it down to 5%, which would be many times what it is in reality. How can a supposedly smart country operate so often in shadows of ignorance this thick and this dark?

My friend Michael Moore once asked, "Will we ever get to the point where we realize that we'll never be safe as long as the rest of the world is living in poverty so that we can have nice running shoes?"

And not just sneakers. When Professor Singer says we'd really save the car, what he's talking about is things like the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, which provides $181 billion in free welfare to prop up grain and cotton prices and buy the love of rich, campaign-contributing American agribusiness (which pretends to be the Joads, but really is Archer-Daniels-Midland). This, of course, creates a glut on the market, artificially driving down prices and crippling African farmers' chances of exporting their way out of poverty. The cotton breathes, the Africans not so much. And the food? Let's just say lots of food rots here, on purpose, to keep up prices, while other people starve.

American politics causes a lot of deaths overseas. Whether it's continuing to cripple the Cuban economy in order to buy votes in Florida (does anyone outside of Little Havana give a rat's a.s.s if we trade with Cuba?), or supporting politically generous pharmaceutical companies in their quest to keep prices up and out of reach of all but a few African AIDS patients, politics and money trump foreign life.

So are we really that evil? Actually, no. I don't feel as guilty as some whites about the colonial past-mostly because, not being a racist, I believe humans of all races have the same amount of good (some) and evil (a lot) in them. If the Africans had been more technologically advanced, they would have done it to us-look at Rick James. They certainly did it to their own people, because it wasn't whites who were capturing the slaves in the African interior and bringing them to port.

But that was then, before enlightenment, compa.s.sion and kinder-gentler came along. Also, mostly, before awareness. Even a century ago, places like Africa were out of sight, out of mind. They really did call it "the Dark Continent."

But today we live in a global village. It's a continent dark by choice now. We can see what's going on all over the globe, and instantly. And the people in those villages, and big cities, know we can see, and they know we could do more if we cared to.

What they are saying about Americans is: "It would cost them so little of their comfort to alleviate a great deal of the abject misery in the world.. but even a little bit is too much for them." We're the rich guy flipping a quarter to the starving mult.i.tudes, claiming to be "Christian," and saying, "Hey, it's not my fault you're starving."

Which is mostly true, it's not our fault. But that doesn't mean we're still not p.r.i.c.ks for giving only a quarter.

The restaurant in the World Trade Center was called Windows on the World. We should take the hint.

The Empty Podium

Back in the late 50s, the only American we were really able to envision making it to the moon was Ralph Cramden's wife, Alice. But President Kennedy saw the s.p.a.ce race as one we couldn't afford to lose, and before we even had a monkey or an ex-n.a.z.i working on it, Kennedy set the lofty goal of a lunar landing and challenged Americans to meet it.

Remember, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country"? Kennedy was unafraid to call upon Americans to sacrifice, pitch in, and demonstrate duty toward country-anti Marilyn Monroe bought it.

In today's America, presidents fall in love with high approval ratings, which are usually a good indication they lack the b.a.l.l.s to do what's right. True leaders.h.i.+p is getting people, despite the political consequences, to follow you down the right path-not waiting to see what path they intend to follow and then running behind shouting encouragement. Kennedy did it with Civil Rights, turning the "Solid South"-solidly Democratic-into a Republican bastion because he insisted that, a hundred years after the Civil War, yeah maybe it was time to make the Southerners start treating the Negroes like human beings.

LBJ did it in Vietnam. He believed in the domino theory, that if we didn't make a stand somewhere, all of Southeast Asia and G.o.d knows what after that would fall to Communism. "If you don't stop 'em on the porch, they'll be raping you in your bedroom," he said. And the guy who wanted more than anyone to be loved by everybody gave up all hope of anything close to that by doing what he thought was right.

Was he right about Vietnam and the dominoes? Different issue.

The point is, a leader does what he thinks is right, not what he thinks the popular thing is. One of the great myths of American life is that this is a democracy. It's not. It's a republic, and none of the founding fathers that we revere so much thought it a good idea for the people-the mob-to run the show. Partic.i.p.ate, yes, through representatives-but then keep clear while they led. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. was founded far from-at the time-the centers of commerce and population. That was on purpose.

A true leader now would tell Americans the unpopular truth: that we use too much energy, that we are spoiled children whose appet.i.te for oil is making us weak and vulnerable. The current administration has not done that. Quite the opposite, they maintain the fiction that drilling for new oil is the only way to ease the choke hold of OPEC. A missile s.h.i.+eld-the invisible s.p.a.ce diaphragm that's never come close to working-that's top priority for the Can-Do Club. But electric and hybrid cars? Still the stuff of futuristic fantasy in Was.h.i.+ngton, even though over 50,000 people already drive them.

If President Bush came out today for exploring alternatives to fossil fuels and for cut-backs in our oil consumption, we Americans might finally grasp the gravity of the situation. Bush, after all, is the perfect president to make such a plea, because he is Big Oil. He was an oilman himself, from an oil family; all his friends are in oil; he's soaking in it right now! Like Nixon going to China, he could take on the issue with unparalleled credibility, not to mention admiration. I myself, soon after 9/11, voiced the hope that our young president might, like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, transform from the callow youth to the mature vicar of reason and purpose.

"Presume not that I am the thing I was," he might say as he shed the veneer of corporate s.h.i.+ll and took up the mantle of wartime leader.