Innocent Abroad

I’ve been waiting for the final death toll before publishing this piece. As of today it sits at 52 dead and 700 injured. With the exception of a few more corpses waiting to be pulled from the wreckage of various train cars, I think we’re pretty close to a final tally, which leads me to the point of this foray. I have a message
for the Islamic extremists responsible for these attacks:

Weak sauce, gentlemen!

I fully grasp the point: display your contempt for the Western world by attacking innocent civilians on their home soil. More to the point, do it in the capital of the nation that is hosting the G8 summit while the summit is in progress. Great concept; good timing; piss poor delivery. Terrorists and assholes you are; showmen you are not.

How the fuck are you going to go from the biggest terrorist attack the Western world has ever seen in 9/11 and follow it up almost 4 years later with something that pales in comparison, having neither the scope, grandeur nor massive psychological impact that 9/11 possessed? Have none of you ever taken a class on showmanship? When those towers fell and all was said and done, you had killed 3,030 people and injured 2,337 more– not only that, you exposed a major weakness in our defenses and managed to bring down two massive skyscrapers in the middle of one of the largest metropolitan areas on the planet, costing the GDP of most third world countries combined just to clean the mess up– all by using box cutters to hijack airplanes. Gutsy shit. Dramatic shit. And for as much as I think Osama Bin Laden is a prick, I have to respect the ingenuity of the organization he put together—one that stands up to the largest, richest and most powerful killing force this world has ever seen. That attack was not cowardly, it was smart, and as of yet justice has not been done.

But you terrorists fucked up this time and exposed your own weakness. On 9/11 you struck fast and deadly– you sent the Western world reeling, and then you rightfully hid the fuck out and kept a low profile while Saddam and the Taliban took the brunt of our wrath. Then last week I saw the words flash on the screen “TERROR ATTACK IN LONDON UNDERGROUND” and I thought “Holy shit! What did they do this time? Blow up Victoria station? Release a biological agent in a terminal? Nope. Nothing so brazen or dramatic—nothing that even came close to approximating 9/11. A couple of bombs on trains and buses— 52 dead; 700 injured.

That’s it? Is that all you’ve got? Honestly, I gave you far too much credit if that’s all you could come up with. If you could get together enough men and material for 4 bombs— why not 8 or 12 or 20? You fucked up because if you could have done more you would have. If you were capable of destroying Victoria station it would be smoke and ash right now and the body count would still be soaring. Something’s changed for you– the game got switched– and that, more than any bullshit reason given by the Bush administration, makes me believe that our war on terror might actually be working.

But seriously, terrorists, weak sauce on you. You can’t go from killing thousands of infidels at a time to just a few dozen. Al-Qaeda, if you were a band you would have been dropped from your label for going platinum then only selling 72 copies of the follow-up.

Look, mother fuckers, Mother Nature took out over 280,000 of her own in Southeast Asia. Chechen separatists killed over 300 people, most of them children, in a standoff at an elementary school. Some other Islamist pricks blew up a train in Madrid, killing 200. The ante has been upped, gentlemen. Next time you better come a little more direct or not come at all, because let’s face it—52 deaths is not enough to make Americans give a shit.

My heart goes out to the victims of the London attacks, as my heart went out to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, AS MY HEART GOES OUT TO THE COUNTLESS MORE INNOCENT IRAQIS WHO HAVE DIED FOR A CRIME NO GREATER THAN OUR DEAD. The world is full of decent people who only want to live their lives in peace, and they die every day for the actions of their fuckhead overlords. Each side invokes the memory of their own dead, spurring on new attacks against innocents not for what they are, but for what they’re made by the state to represent—fundamentalism, corruption, oppression, ultimate evil– and the cycle continues: each new martyr adds fuel to the flame. Unchecked, this cycle will escalate until we find ourselves staring at the ruins of civilization, trying to remember exactly how all this shit got started.

It’s a slippery slope kids, I hope we know what we’re doing.

Adam

Trackback URI | Comments RSS