It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to.

Have you ever seen those little yellow ribbons on the back of cars? Some of them are yellow like in the Tony Orlando song and some are red, white and blue. Mostly they say “Support Our Troops” or something like that. But now you can find them for almost everything. I’ve seen them for P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s. I’m all right with that. Then there are the ones for diseases like little pink ones for breast cancer and puzzle pieces for Autism. Have you seen those? They’re the same magnetic ribbons with different color puzzle pieces but there one piece missing. Pretty appropriate, I guess. I don’t know how the autistics feel about them. I guess I’ll have to ask someone. All I know about Autism is what I’ve seen on Rain Man. Actually that’s not true. I know an Autistic child. He’s a special kid. He likes Sesame Street videos. Mostly when I see him he’s watching the credits over and over again. He’ll repeat them as he hears certain things like, “Created by Jim Henson” and things like that. It’s funny and also a little amazing the things he’s attaches onto and repeats to himself. He loves his Grandfather and when Grandpa comes over he really seems to respond. He’s also and artist of sorts and his father has his entire garage lined with his son’s pictures. I didn’t really intend to talk about Autism but it sorta just came up. Besides I like that movie, Rain Man. I don’t know if it’s accurate but I’d never heard of Autism before that movie. Or met anyone with Autism until I met this little boy. He’s not a code for my own child or brother or something. He’s a boy I know. A nephew of my sister-in-law. Her brother’s son. If you know me you already know who it is so it’s no secret. Names have been withheld for no reason in particular. Anyway, back to those little signs. So you know them, right. Everybody does. (I wish I invented them among a million other things like Snowman Kits.) One thing that does makes me scratch my head is dandruff. Another thing is when I see these yellow magnetic ribbons on the back of a Hummer. A Hummer! It just seems so ironic somehow. You can draw your own conclusions. Big car, guzzles gas, war and terrorism in the Middle East, Americans Dying. ‘Nuff said.
We already know that Oil and Water don’t mix. But what about Oil and Ego? Those two go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly, Ernie and Bert, R2D2 and C3PO, They just seem to always find each other. I mean look at the oil barons. Look at the dictatorships of the Middle East. They just go together. Now I don’t know too much about the oil industry except that I need it desperately yet I wish I didn’t. I wish I had one of those cars from Back To The Future that had a Mr. Fusion attached to it. (Or was it Mr. Fission? Either way we get huge energy because E equals M times C squared, if you know what I mean.) I was watching some interesting PBS special last night (Tuesday, 9/6/05, Channel 13, PBS) called Road to 9/11 that I have to comment on.
After WWI, the British and French (remember that fact) stayed around the Middle East because they had defeated the Ottomans and thought it was a really neat place that needed meddling with, tinkering, you know, a fixer upper. So they took out the maps and divided up the area according to their own designs with no real attention to what the Arabs thought. Without going too much into detail, the Arabs didn’t like it and fought back. Initially they embraced the Nazis who tried to move in because the of the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” So far the United States has very little to do with this. Got it. British and French Colonialism. O.K.? Then the Nazis set up a base in Lebanon. The Baathists, the governing party of Sadam Hussein, is based on the Nazi Party. Great role model. Ataturk comes in and modernizes and secularizes the Ottoman Empire and renames it Turkey. This doesn’t bode well with the rest of the Middle East. A rebellious faction of Muslims rises in Colonial Egypt. The “Muslim Brothers” is the group most identified with the modern “Al Qaeda.” After WWII, the Jews settle Israel and then the shit hits the fan. These Arabs do not want the Jews there and the Palestinians, displaced kinda just sit around getting angry. Let me add that Saudi Arabia has enough resources to settle these guys but they don’t. Lebanon has laws limiting Palestinians from settling there. Yep, no one else wants them. Not because they don’t like them. Nope it’s because if the Palestinians are happy then the populace has nothing to bitch about and may turn against the rich ruling families who don’t share the oil wealth. Remember the fact that Ego and Oil don’t mix. When Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser, got into bed with the Soviets because he didn't like the Westerners, the United States decided that to fight Communism everywhere in the world they needed to back Israel. Now is that the only reason, probably not. Did the United States have good intentions for Israel? Maybe a little. Did the United States base most of its foreign policy decisions at the time and for the next fifty years purely on fighting the Soviet Union’s influence and expansion? Yep. Did this policy get us in a lot of trouble and into conflicts that we probably shouldn’t have been involved in (See Vietnam War? Hell yeah! Did it sometimes advance science at a breakneck pace (See Space Race)? Oh Baby! So fighting Communism or the stagnant form of Karl Marx’s philosophy that the Soviet Union professed to follow was a big motivator in the U.S. foreign policy in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. Enter the U.S. into the Middle East picture. Oil in the Middle East was the icing on the cake. A big conclusion of this PBS Special is that oil funded the stagnation of the Economic and Political growth in the Middle East because the wealth of oil sales allowed oppressive governments to finance everything they needed without taxation. Taxation without Representation? How about no taxation hence no representation, no voice to be heard in the government and no reason to listen. (Stay! Heel! Play Dead!) There was no impudence for the government to help or even pay attention to the masses and since they spent a lot of money on their armies they could quell any uprising.
Osama Bin Laden comes in and because of the Waahaabi form of Islam that he learned as a youth which interprets the Koran in a not so nice way, he tries to fight his government but that’s a little hard because they’d kill you as soon as look at you. So he goes to Afghanistan and fights the Russians. He does a pretty good job and we pat him on the head here. We also pat little sadistic Saddam on the head for fighting against the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. There was that whole hostage business there that we didn’t go in for. So these two guys are sitting there and doing nothing. Saddam decides to invade Kuwait and Osama offers to pitch in and help resist the Infidels but “no thanks, we can handle this one.” That’s about it. No secret pact. No training camps for Al Qaeda. Nothing. Saddam has his own death squads, thank you very much but we’ll drop a line if we want some advice, Osama. While we fight in Iraq, Osama fumes and blames the Americans. He probably blames the British too. May be has a thing for the French, I don’t know but he targets us. Or U.S. What’s up with that? The French are so full of themselves over there saying, (French accent) “Well we did not start this fight with Osama Bin Laden. You Americans started it and we will not get involved, no, no. We do not support you. We fart in your general direction.”
Can someone remind them that it was they and the British who started this whole thing? Huh? Typical French. Now I don’t think we should be in Iraq. I think Bush lied to us about the reasons we went to war including WMDs. But I hate arrogance in this administration and the French. I mean, we gave ‘em Jerry Lewis comedies. What else do they want? Don’t they get it?
Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden is still out there. He’s in the mountains somewhere hiding in some cave or holed up in some sympathetic house. I hope they have T.V. where he is. Osama should learn his history. He’s a very bad man. He’s a fanatic. He’s an archenemy of the United States. He should have watched that PBS special.

I hate that guy.

L.S.C.

Share