By Paul Krassner
"In the dark times, will there still be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
There will be singing about the dark times."
--Bertolt Brecht
September 15, 2001--From now on, everything will be divided between
what happened Before the events of September 11 and what happened
After. Lane Sarasohn got caught in the middle. He is an editor of Ironic
Times, an online weekly which satirizes the news, always leading off
with apocryphal headlines marching along a ticker. On Monday,
September 10, their new edition came out, and this was one of the jokes
on the ticker: Taliban: No more Mr. Nice Guys....
Lane told me that, in the wake of the utter devastation committed the
next day by suicide pilots and their hijacker crews, the editors decided
to excise that joke from their Web site. Otherwise, since the Taliban has
been sheltering prime suspect Osama bin Laden, that
particular headline would have been misperceived as insensitive.
What made the reference sardonic in the first place was that--having
just put eight aid workers on trial for allegedly attempting to convert
Muslims to Christianity, a crime that could be punishable by death--the
fundamentalist Taliban ruling party in Afghanistan had not exactly been
Mr. Nice Guys previously. They gave fanatics a bad name, and when it
came to human rights, they made China look like angels.
Under the Taliban theocracy, females are not allowed to appear in
public without being covered from head to toe, they are forbidden to
leave the house without being accompanied by a male family member,
they are not permitted to attend school, they cannot be treated by male
doctors, and they are banned from praticing medicine or any
profession.
Taliban zealots have destroyed a gigantic statue of Buddha, and they
have declared it compulsory for all non-Muslim inhabitants of
Afghanistan to wear a piece of cloth attached to their pocket to indicate
that they are not Muslims. Shades of Nazi Germany. And yet,
on May 17, 2001, the United States presented the Taliban rulers with
$43 million. Talk about taxation without representation.
Five days later, syndicated columnist Robert Scheer wrote:
"Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy
every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush
administration will embrace you."
All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war. The gift,
announced by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to recent aid,
makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that rogue
regime1 for declaring that opium growing is against the
will of God.
Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading
anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from
which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on
Aemerican embassies in Africa in 1998. Sadly, the Bush administration is
cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at
U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul
government will not turn over bin Laden. The war on drugs has
become
our own fanatics1 obsession and easily trumps all other concerns.
Most of the farmers who grew the poppies will now confront
starvation. That's because the Afghan economy has been ruined by the
religious
extremism of the Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously
tolerated quick cash crop overwhelming. For that reason, the opium
ban will not last unless the U.S. is willing to pour far larger amounts of
money into underwritng the Afghan economy.
As the DEA1s Steven Casteel admitted, The bad side of the ban is that
it's bringing their country...to economic ruin.1 Nor did he hold out
much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat,
which
require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no
longer exists in that devastated country. There1s little doubt that the
Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of
opium in order to stay in power.
And this time, American taxpapers won1t get any refunds, either.
For the past few days, I1ve been reading the newspapers, checking the
Internet to see what was left out of the papers, and then
channel-surfing, from CNN (with their America1s New War logo,
reassuring viewers that it1s not a rerun) to MTV (where one of the
Beastie Boys advised: The last thing the terrorists want is for us to
work together).
On the Fox News Network, Edward Peck, former ambassador to Iraq,
was an unusually outspoken guest. He said the terrorists acted as they
did not because America is a freedom loving country, but because they
feel the U.S. has been treating them the same way throughout the
years--bombing Iraq for the last ten years whenever they felt like
it--and adding to the list (Take Panama, take Haiti, take Cambodia)
before he was cut off and dismissed.
Back in May 1996, on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl confronted UN
Ambassador Madeleine Albright: We have heard that a half-million
children have
died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that's more children
than died in Hiroshima and, you know, is the price worth it? Albright
replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the
price is worth it."
None of this is one nano-iota of solace for the mass anguish that is
taking place in shell-shocked America. So much human suffering, for
the sake of our nation1s karma. But everybody perceives every
occurrence through their own subjective filters. And so it was
incredibly cruel of televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to
agree on TV that:
"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to
give us probably what we deserve. The abortionists have got to bear
some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we
destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really
believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the
gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an
alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way--all of
them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their
face and say, You helped this happen."
The pious pair became such pathetic parodies of their own
fundamentalist agenda that I thought it was a hoax, despite the fact
that it was published in the Washington Post.
In the face of all the platitudes and rhetoric of politicians, professors
and pundits--those who speak of unspeakable horror and then, when
thanked by their TV host, reply, My pleasure--the original impact of this
ongoing tragedy was summed up concisely by a random teenager being
interviewed by Tom Brokaw on NBC. She had been awakened by her
mother on that tragic Tuesday morning and brought into the living
room to see what was happening on television. The girl
recalled, I was like Whoa! And then she added, It will probably be in
the history books.
Meanwhile, Ironic Times has decided to run a best-of edition for the
week beginning September 17--something that will hopefully cheer you
up, subscribers will be notified, and give us time to cheer up as well. An
editor, Matt Neuman, tells me, Were we publishing a regular edition
next week, our ticker might start: Bin Laden cancels all public
appearances....
Of course, by the time you read this, bin Laden may already have been
taken out, and I don't mean to dinner and a movie.
This is the first thing I have written After the events of September 11,
2001, a dividing line which must be acknowledged here. Everything
else in this book was written during the few years before.
More of Paul's writings from his online site.