The real mission
This is the time of year when our most popular tabloids run the predictions made by their staff “psychics” for the coming year. Of course, these stories are pure unadulterated twaddle, with tabloid psychics having their credibility forever disembowelled by the single and simple fact that they all missed 9/11.
But as I sit here at my computer in this fresh new year, I have this fairly strong predilection that something is indeed gonna happen sometime in 2011. A specific political event(s). Admittedly, it’s a feeling that falls short of any sort of supernatural clairvoyance that makes my bunions tingle or anything Stephen Kingish like that, but it’s in me, nonetheless, and it’s gotta come out. It’s something that’s gonna happen in America and western Europe that’s a bit overdue. And it’s simply this: People are gonna finally get out and hit the streets in significant numbers, at least six digits worth, over the war in Afghanistan.
We’re gonna hit the streets and ask Why? and we’re gonna say Enough! and we’re gonna make it clear that we’re fed up with us being the latest chumps who’ve fallen into the quicksand of history and dare to think that we can mold this wild country of warlords and schemers and cutthroats and anarchy into some kind of political Jeffersonian cousin with which we can work. We’re also going to make it clear that we’re no longer buying into the phony fear of Al Qaida boogeymen, that we no longer tolerate being duped on the junk notion that we have to have a gigantic, lumbering military in Afghanistan in order to somehow feel safer here, that more and more of us now feel that we’ll be fine, that we can protect ourselves here without waging insanely frustrating and horribly expensive whack-a-mole wars all over the planet looking for these supposedly vicious and dangerous boogeymen, who in reality can’t even get their underpants or shoes to light on fire at the appropriate time in order to terrorize us. We’re gonna hit the streets and say, Let’s do it. Let’s declare victory and leave. Sure, it’s a bullshit declaration. So what? Goddammit, let’s just get it on and bring back some old-fashioned isolationism!
And then administration officials, feeling the heat from these massive protests, will reaffirm that troops will indeed be leaving the country shortly. Some of them. Actually, a fair percentage of them. And one of these administration types will confess to some blogger while speaking anonymously that, in reality, the United States no longer gives a flying pigsnort about Afghanistan. We know the place is a mess. We know it’s gonna remain a mess for the forseeable future. It’s not really salvagable. We’re basically just keeping thousands of troops over there so as to mess up the sleep patterns of a certain Mr. Ahmadinejad. OK? Got it?
