Peter Krupa

When you live in a foreign country, you become hyper-sensitive to the preoccupations and foibles and absurdities of your adopted land. Then one day you inadvertently turn that sensitivity on your own culture, looking it square in its lazy-eyed, slack-jawed, moon-shaped face, and you wonder what in the hell is going on.

More to the point, I just had the misfortune to watch a few minutes of an episode of 24. Keep in mind that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack on American soil (nor a conviction for the planning thereof) for almost seven years, and before that it was another seven years. Yet for some reason, there exists a TV show - a hugely (or formerly hugely?) popular TV show - completely dedicated to the machinations of shady brown men with names like “Ahmed” and “Yusef” who, like an indiscriminate alligator in some one-off horror flick, want to hurt white people living in the suburbs.

A woman on the show literally just called 911 and said, “A terrorist is holding my son hostage.”

A terrorist! A terrorist? As if the 911 operator is going to say, “Of course! A terrorist! Happens all the time!”

Seriously, is this what people in the United States are thinking about? Terrorists hurting their families? For fuck’s sake, this is the lamest terrorist threat in the history of terrorist threats, even below bee-swarms, lightning strikes, nail gun accidents, dehydration, etc. etc.

And yet we have politicians making campaign ads about jihad (”this century’s nightmare“) and idiots in West Virginia who won’t vote for Obama because they think he’s a Muslim! Any more of this and I will respectfully resign.