h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A Mostly Serious Rant About the World Situation

Oct. 11, 2001

A lot has happened in the last month. On Sept. 11, very large
numbers of people watched unthinkable destruction rain down
on about a dozen office buildings in Lower Manhattan, as
well as one wedge of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Manhattan's woes are still of utmost concern to New Yorkers
and their families and friends, but anyone who is outside this
circle is now being forced to watch unthinkable destruction
rain down on Kabul, Jalalabad, and other areas of Afghanistan.
Perhaps I am a bit too cynical, but I can't help thinking that
the spotlight would have stayed on the site of the Twin Towers
devastation longer if one or more well-known celebrities had
numbered among the casualties. Of course, in my book the
policemen and firefighters who perished there are among the
greatest celebrities our planet has produced. I just don't know
their names. In any event, I continue to read the New York
Times in an effort to see how New Yorkers are managing to
function in the aftermath of the Twin Towers atrocities.

Before I leave this topic, and while the memories are still
fresh in my mind, I have to mention the classy issue of "The
New Yorker" that was mostly devoted to the Sept. 11
tragedies. The cover appeared totally black at first glance
(not inappropriate in the context of such funereal events).
Looked at more closely, the outlines of two towers could
be discerned, looking like two tombstones (also quite
funereal). Perhaps this is an allusion that New Yorkers
would pick up on fairly readily, because the Twin Towers
were dubbed "The world's tallest tombstones" when they
were first erected. Sometimes life imitates art!

Not to be outdone, "The New Republic" devoted some space
to a critique of the "New Yorker" Twin Towers issue. What
stuck in TNR's craw was that so many of TNY's writers got
hung up on pretty language in their descriptions of the havoc
of Sept. 11. John Updike, for instance, made the day seem
too sunny and cheerful, using words like "tinkle" to describe
the sound of objects falling (he observed the devastation from
a mile away, in Brooklyn Heights). What TNR's critics do
not seem to have realized is that there are large numbers of
people who were not on hand to witness these events personally.
Reading accounts from a number of different perspectives is
all we have access to if we want to grasp their significance.
John Updike had a right to be in a cheerful frame of mind, and
to say that things sounded as if they were tinkling. There are
plenty of other accounts that came from the shocked/overwhelmed/
panicked/grief-stricken points of view. I have read plenty of them,
as well.

Various public officials and media commentators (including
--shudder--those horrible supermarket tabloids) have said
that the hijackers who caused the Sept. 11 devastation were
acting against the teachings of the Islamic religion. This
is a somewhat mysterious point to be making. Would the
members of the Ku Klux Klan have taken off their white
sheets and stopped lynching Afro-Americans if someone had
pointed out to them that they were not being good
Christians? Hardly likely. The mindset that allows one to
contemplate gross cruelty against other humans is not easily
affected by logical discourse. Of course, it is not a mystery
why the public officials have been making the point. Most
Americans do not come from an Islamic background, and do
not know about Mohammed's ban on killing defenseless civilians,
elderly people, women, children, and clergymen of other religions.
There is a possibility that some Muslims will resent having
someone not from their religious tradition talking about what's Islamic and what's not, but it probably is helpful in soothing
many Americans' jangled nerves. In any event, it's better than
the alternatives.

This essay is going rather slowly, and I will have to continue
it another time.

World Situation Rant, Part 2

Oct. 13, 2001

Going West, we come to Boston, a city that
has a big inferiority complex in its relationship
with New York. I have lost count of the number
of times Bostonians have told me they expect
Boston to be the next place to be hit by the
terrorists. It's almost as if they're disappointed
that they haven't been hit yet. Please, let's just
be grateful for our good luck so far, and let's
hope it continues!

Going further west, we come to Osama Bin
Laden, who had the nerve to get his picture
on the cover of Time magazine. Quite frankly,
I'm more than a little jealous! I've been waiting
53 years for them to put my picture on their
cover, and this still hasn't happened. If crashing
airplanes is now a criterion for fame, I'm sure
I could do that just as easily as Bin Laden's
pilots did it, not that I would ever want to.
Of course, the upshot of it would be that I
would be dead... Hmmmm. Maybe I don't like
that idea after all. Besides, I might have the
bad luck to be on the same plane as another
cell of Bin Laden hijackers, and I would end
up dead and Bin Laden would still be the
one to get on the cover of Time--for a second
time (Pardon the pun)! Okay, never mind, then.

In any event, I have to wonder if Bin Laden has
ever done anything constructive in his life.
His fellow Afghans were starving because of a
drought. His Taliban was preventing U.N. relief
officials from distributing food. He gave a hundred
million dollars of his own money to the Taliban,
surely more than enough to feed starving Afghans,
but it apparently all went to weapons of destruction.
How is it that there are so many Arabs who consider
him a role model?

Next time: Eschatologists' verdict on Bin Laden.
Nostradamists' interpretations. The Ladenese Epistles.

Eventually: Half-Gone-istan.

October 15, 2001

World Situation Rant, Part 3

Before I tap into the astrologists' and Nostradamists'
verdicts, I would like to briefly touch on what a doctor
told me about anthrax the other day. He said:

1. anthrax is not very contagious.
2. Probably not more than about 100 Americans have
died from anthrax in the last 90 years.
3. With antibiotics, most anthrax cases can be cleared up.
Penicillin should work.
4. If you are not a high government official or a media
person with a big mouth (is there any other kind?), the
terrorists probably have no reason to target you. If, for
some reason, the terrorists are shooting for a mass killoff
of largely anonymous Americans, anthrax will not be their
best weapon. If they try this in spite of the disadvantages,
what is likely to happen is this: once one or two of the
affected people are diagnosed, pretty much everyone
who was exposed will be treated. Once treated, assuming
the disease is caught early enough, they should be okay.
(A few may be okay even without treatment. I know of a
man who has survived untreated anthrax. He is now in his
nineties.)

I suspect that the panic that is gripping much of America
these days is overdone. Anthrax is a controlled substance.
Once it becomes obvious that someone is sending spores
through the mail, the terrorists' access to it will become
further constricted. So, they don't want to waste it. Nor, for that
matter, do they really need to send out a lot. They can scare
the American public quite easily with just 20 or 30 cases.
Moreover, it saddens me to see any Americans helping
the terrorists by offering suggestions as to what they can do
next. Right after the Sept. 11 atrocities, the media was full
of worry that the terrorists' next step would involve anthrax,
and sure enough anthrax was used. Obviously, the terrorists
read our newspapers and watch our TV shows. I propose
that the media start talking about our great national fear of
being inundated with ice cream. Maybe this will trick the
terrorists into sending every American a hot fudge sundae.

Next time: Eschatologists' verdict on Bin Laden.
Nostradamists' interpretations.
The Ladenese Epistles.

Eventually: Half-Gone-istan.

October 22, 2001

World Situation Rant, Part 4: The Roots of Terrorism

Some observers feel that modern-day terrorism had its
origin during the American Civil War, when the Northern
forces conceived of weakening southern resistance by
undermining the capacity of southerners to provide the
basics of life for themselves. The result was the deliberate
trashing of farms, killing of livestock, and other atrocities
during Sherman's infamous march through Georgia to
the sea in 1864 and 1865. If you agree with this point
of view, you can be forgiven for thinking that the destruc-
tion of at least 10 office buildings, a military headquarters,
at least 5 airplanes, and upwards of 5,000 mostly unarmed
civilian lives on Sept. 11, 2001 represented the terrorist
chickens finally flying home to roost.

I am not so sure that this type of approach is all that
new, however. Civilians were bound to suffer hideously
in England's siege of Calais in the 16th or 17th century.
Indeed, surrounding a castle and cutting off supplies
until the inhabitants start starving was a pretty common
military tactic in the Dark and Middle Ages. (It was also
used on a grand scale by the Nazis against Russia in
World War Two, resulting in mass starvation.) Shooting
flaming arrows over the parapets would have been in
the tradition of terrorism even if it wasn't called that in
those days. Killing a few victims at random to send a
message to everyone else dates back thousands of years,
and certainly qualifies as scare tactics (a first cousin
of terrorism?).

War is hell. Total war is total hell. If you're a civilian
in a war zone, don't bet on escaping injury or death.
Those Afghanis who tried to get out of Afghanistan
as soon as tensions between George Bush and Taleban
started heating up were acting very intelligently, in
my opinion.

World Affairs Rant, Nov. 1, 2001

The main reason for my slowness in covering the astrological
and Biblical aspects of Osana Bin Laden's activities is my
feeling that such considerations are not very important.

I tried doing an Internet search for sites that covered the
Anti-Christ and Bin Laden. The ones I found seemed to
indicate that Bin Laden was not born in the right year.
The Anti-Christ would presumably be born in the 6th month
of the 66th year of some century, in order to qualify for the
diabolical triple 6's. Some other guy (his name begins with
a "K", and he may be from Syria) met this criterion. The
first problem, for me, is that he isn't Bin Laden, and may not have
much of anything to do with Bin laden or the WTC attacks.
This is a lesser fish, one that I'd like to throw back. The second
problem is that no one knows what kind of funny mushrooms
the author of "Revelations" was smoking when he produced his
predictions. The third, of course, is that we can't rule out the
possibility that the Anti-Christ will be born in 2066, 2166,
2266, etc., etc., or never.

Astrologists are being careful not to overstep their bounds
with regard to Bin Laden. Reliable data on Bin Laden's
date and time of birth are not available, so a precise chart
of where the stars were when he entered this world cannot
be constructed. And even if it could, that would hardly tell
the U.S. Defense Dept. where he is hiding, or what he would do
next.

Somewhat less useful, but quite fascinating, is the chart for
New York itself, which probably faces an attack of some kind
on Oct. 5, 2001 (give or take two days). I don't understand
the specifics of the case, but apparently Mars and Neptune
will cross paths at that time. Mars is the God of war in Greek
mythology, and would indicate the probability of an attack.
Neptune was the God of the sea. So, an attack from the water?
Maybe a big ship being hijacked and rammed into the Brookyln Bridge?
A car bomb in one of the tunnels leading into Manhattan?
Exploding Mars bars being handed out on the Staten Island Ferry?

Tieing up Some Loose Ends

I've spent quite a lot of time trying to find out how many people
DIDN'T die in the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11.
In other words, out of the 30,000 to 50,000 people who were
in the buildings at the time, how many escaped with their lives?
An exact figure will never be available, of course, but last Sunday's
"Parade" magazine quoted NY Mayor Giuliani's best estimate
as "at least 25,000." So, not only were the perpetrators and their
supporting players guilty of the deaths of more than 5,000
(again, no exact figure is likely ever to emerge), but they also
were guilty of the attempted murder of more than 25,000. And
we haven't even begun to talk about property damage.

This expanded assessment of guilt is important for people like
me who sometimes are tempted to lose sight of the reasons
for hunting wily Taliban fighters in the wilds of Afghanistan
in sub-zero temperatures. Sure, a lot of the locals have never
known anything but warfare, and can do it in their sleep. One
suspects that retraining for a peacetime economy would be
traumatic for many of them. Still, the WTC and Pentagon
attacks dwarf just about all historical attacks on civilians
with the possible exceptions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Maybe we should send warm clothing to the Afghani
refugees, of whom there are many.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia wants the U.S. to do its bombing
and then get out of Afghanistan soon. What funny mushrooms
have the Saudis been smoking? Retooling the U.S. military
for expert performance in that country is a little bit like steering
the Titanic away from icebergs. Half the people I know think
that President Bush rushed in too fast. The other half think
he went too slowly. Please! He didn't have a huge standing
army familiar with the terrain of Afghanistan on hand on Sept. 12.
It would months, or even years, to produce the kind of force
that's needed now. That's why bombers were sent in. But
carpet-bombing will only help so much. And, winter is coming.
If Bush had waited longer than he did, the crucial battles would
be fought (as, indeed, they may yet be fought) in the worst of
all possible weather.