Teresa at Making Light has all the good links on the recent Aqua Teen al-Qaeda Force scrum in Boston. By now you're likely familiar with the basic outlines of the story: a marketing gimic featuring cartoon figures with LEDs sparked the sort of all-hands-on-deck interagency response that supposedly could've saved New Orleans, if only Hurricane Katrina had looked a little more like a vast, meteorological Lite Brite kit. Imagine the Pavlovian mania of our Fatherland Shock Troops when some drunken Peorian phones in the flashing-light bomb threat at two AM while confabbing with some fellow Rotarians in Vegas.
Officialdom, meanwhile, congratulates themselves to the tune of: This just proves that we're prepared to respond! It represents the ultimate triumph of the hypothetical over the observed. September 11 happened; Katrina happened; the East Coast blackouts happened. But plenty of phony terrorist plots have been broken up, and the last storm season was a piddler, and thus . . . Almost everything we do to prevent and mitigate these disasters is wrong, but because we do it so well when there's no actual disaster pending, by god, we must be doing something right. To make the basic libertarian point: This is the problem with government: It endlessly aggregates as a corrective to problems of which it itself is the ultimate cause. Homeland Security, such as the Stalinist euphemism goes, and the whole attendant structure of the National Security State is a neverending response by the United States Government to security problems, real and imagined, that are created, grown, and catalyzed by the policies of the United States Government. As goes the famous dialogue in Dr. Strangelove:
TURGIDSON: The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.To which I have nothing noteworthy to add.
MUFFLEY: There's nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
TURGIDSON: Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
MUFFLEY: (anger rising) General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.
TURGIDSON: Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up sir.
14 comments:
Yeah. Cause what happened in Boston wasn't the logic result of five years of over the top marketing of fear (mongering if you will) on the part of this administration and their homonculi in the corporate media.
Haircuts in the 70s, indeed.
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/
These fellows are giving it exactly the degree of seriousness it deserves.
MB
"Beware because our God is an indian that turns into a wolf." Err
"No. That's Wolfen." Other Mooninite.
This from Pravda, I mean Fox:
"The device was detonated and determined to be harmless, but as a precaution the station and the interstate shut down temporarily. "
MB
shut down in one direction. i drove by on the other side with nary a tap on the brakes, but it sure was cool watching the helicopters hovering over the charles.
Look at it this way. After 5 years of Rove's marketing campaign, Bin Laden is a cartoon. Zawahiri is a cartoon. Saddam is a cartoon. Ahmadinejad is a cartoon, and the Terminator is governor of California. You can see how the cops might be a bit worried about CARTOONS THAT KILL.
The only thing I would fault in the law enforcement response is the recourse to civilian courts. Clearly a crime like this demands a military tribunal. God knows what classified cartoon evidence might otherwise be disclosed. Extraordinary rendition of the perpetrators to Toon Town.
fan note from a flounder
i once had the dialogue of docs memorized ...err nearly
terry s that middle market bull lee
had me in his spell
thru easy rider
...Clearly a crime like this demands a military tribunal...
Pity poor Ted. He dumped Hanoi Jane, but Rupert & Co. will still have his carcass...
It's a relief to see we've finally graduated from the Politics of Fear. (I don't know what I'm gonna do with all that duct tape and plastic sheeting.) Now, with this Aqua Teen Terrorist Bomb incident, it's obvious we're forging boldly ahead into a new era - The Politics of the Absurd.
You'd have to read way down, to comment #141 to see it, but there's a prime example of the bootlicking/bullying magical thinking mentality on display in that thread. Patrick N-H deals with it appropriately:
"It's easy, as Michael's #141 points out, to "Monday-morning quarterback." It's also easy, as Michael goes on to do, to bluster about how people should have "lopping shears" applied to their "gonads."
It's good to stick up for first responders. But once your position becomes "hooray for the police, no matter what they do," you're just worshipping power, and it's not surprising when you move from there to fantasies about torturing and mutilating people who annoy you."
We also reside and work in Boston (hello Maximo! how can you tell a shutdown I-93 North at 9:00 AM from I-93 North on any other day? ;) ). The local Intertubes were abuzz with gossip about how the Sullivan Sq. device was a "mooninite" early in the morning. How did we, the unwashed, know this and the cops not?
How could this information have been communicated to the cops, to keep them from shutting down Storrow Drive, the Longfellow Bridge and all river traffic on the Charles?
And further, how did the cops go from finding 0 of these in two weeks to 4 in the same day?
Our theory is that, with news of British terror arrests breaking that morning, local cops were put on some type of Double Ultra Secret Alert by Homeland ("look out - other stuff might happen!"). The idea of a worldwide, simultaneous terrorist strike fits in with the fictitious Jack Bauer narrative that the Administration has operated under for the last year - no, seriously, that's the premise of the current season - but has no basis in reality.
All we can say is: thank the saints the Mooninites didn't get their hands on the Foreigner belt. With the power of Foreigner.
Smithee, haven't you seen that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where the crew whips up a full line of fashion using only duct tape and assorted other items around the ship ? The plastic sheeting will make splendid parachute pants, as well as those retro-1970s portable rain bonnets so beloved of crones and crones-in-the-making (ie-yours truly). Oh, and remember the American Apparel model: Harass the womenfolk constantly at work so we remember our place. All great businesses are run by men who keep one hand permanently lodged in their pants. :p
Oh yeah! That was season four, episode 9 - Hercules Vs The Moon Men. (NERD ALERT! NERD ALERT! NERD ALERT!)
Was that the Deep Hurting episode? Or was the Hercules vs. Someone Else?
Tsk. No no no. Teenagers From Outer Space.
I gotta' do everything around here...
but Herc vs. Aliens was the Deep Hurting, right?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's creeped out by those American Apparel ads.
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