Peter Krupa

Today’s elaborately staged announcement that the FBI thwarted Terrorists intent on killing and maiming US servicemen at Fort Dix should send a chill into hearts of all red-blooded Americans.

Or maybe it shouldn’t.

Because looking at what these guys had planned, I feel pretty goddamn safe. First of all, they were going to attack a military base. Bright. We don’t have all the details, but apparently their plan was “to purchase rocket-propelled grenade launchers then use them to fire at Humvees at Fort Dix and ‘light the whole place up,’ Chris Christie, the United States attorney in New Jersey, said today.”

Great idea fellas. I mean, rocket-propelled grenades, you can just pick those up at a hardware store, right?

One of the suspects, a Mr. Mohamad Ibriham Shnewer, was reported to have told a witness “that they could kill ‘at least 100 soldiers’ using rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, and that the witness was urged to help lead the attack because he had prior experience in the Egyptian military.”

Oh, come on dude, don’t hold back. Tell us how many you can really kill. Wait, never mind, Shnewer had a plan: “They would use a map procured by Mr. Tatar, who used to deliver pizza there, the affidavit said, and the attack would begin with a strike that would cause a power outage.”

Sounds professional. And it was, because they not only watched training videos on the interweb, they “collected weapons including handguns, shotguns and semi-automatic assault weapons, and trained on firearms in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania.”

I’ve trained on those very same firearms in a corn field in Illinois, several times. Such “training” generally involves shooting things. Of course, I didn’t have any connections to international terrorist groups.

Of course, these guys didn’t either, so they couldn’t actually be trapped in the web of illegal wiretaps the Bush administration has set up. Instead, the dastardly scheme was tripped up when these cunning Terrorists took a video tape to a video store to have it dubbed onto DVD, a tape which contained images “that the F.B.I described as firing assault weapons in a ‘militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting Allah Akbar (God is Great).’”

The video store clerk called the Feds.

All that to say, I’m very happy they caught these losers. But the “Clash of Civilizations” has turned out to be kind of a disappointment.

I really, honestly, think my head just exploded. Last night at the New York Public Library, there was a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton over the question of the existence of God. The event was moderated by the Dean of Harvard Divinity School Slate.com’s editor, Jacob Weisberg.

Now, take a minute to go clean up the shit in your pants from laughter and/or outrage, and then we’ll unpack this event. Ready? Good.

There’s a blow-by-blow account of the interaction over on the New York Times, so I won’t rehash the whole thing. Just, you know, be careful if you read it, because you’re bound to shit your pants at least once or twice more. Probably the juiciest zinger came from Sharpton:

“At the end what is refreshing is that you are a man of faith,” Mr. Sharpton told Mr. Hitchens, to much laughter, “because any man that at this point has faith that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has more faith than any religious person I know.”

Ouch. After the opening jibes, it more or less devolved into the following exchange:

Hitchens: God is an asshole.

Sharpton: That’s not an existential argument.

Hitchens: Religion does horrible things!

Sharpton: That’s still not an existential argument.

It’s funny that even though Hitchens wrote a fucking book on the topic, Sharpton more or less cleaned his clock, proving once again that you should never trust an avowed Trotskyist and former Nation columnist to make logical arguments. I do find it hard to swallow, however, that Al Sharpton was the most articulate God-believer to be found in all of New York City.

But anyway, all of that is beside the point. The real purpose of this event was to make a scene by inviting two ridiculous culture-war blowhards under the same roof, and then having the thing moderated by the ultimate scene creator/contrarian, the editor of Slate.com.

New York Public Library? Or Fox News? I report, you decide. But I really think that, even at the highest levels, our culture is screwed.

Personally, I’ve got my money on Delta Farce. The plot:

Three bumbling Army reservists bound for Iraq are accidentally dropped at Mexican village besieged by hostile forces.

Great. First the skinny jeans, Nu Wave, mohawks, old-skool Vans, and leg warmers. Now, mad-cap military comedies. As a culture, I think it’s high time we put a stop to this 80s obsession.

UPDATE: “This spring, they’re not being all they can be, but they’re doing all they can - to get out alive!”

Lord save us.

While we’re still holding vigils and trying to come to terms with what it all means, one thing is certain: Cho Seung-Hui’s plays are the perfect length for YouTube reenactments. Now, in what is possibly the perfect incarnation of Our Society These Days, a fat man wearing a South Park T-shirt and breathing mostly through his mouth gives a solo rendition of “Richard McBeef” from the bowels of the “Parent’s Basement Playhouse.”

I know it’s been said before, but seriously: On YouTube, nothing is sacred. (And I believe we can expect an essay to that effect to appear somehwere in the mainstream media in T-minus 10 days.)

As America’s fearless punditocracy rushes to politicize the tragedy at Virginia Tech, my ever-clever comment section has put together a handy little scapegoat list for them to consult. So far, we’ve got drugs, videogames, Buddhism/Atheism/lack-of-monotheistic-Christian-God, immigrants, liberals, conservatives, guns, bullying, and racism.

It’s a good start. Of course the school administration is taking a hit, and I imagine we’ll have some people losing their jobs over missed warning signs and whatnot. Predictably, the shooter was a “loner.”

Aside from all that, however, it’s remarkable just how random, unpredictable, and non-stereotypical this shooting was. First of all, the kid was a Korean immigrant, making vague accusations of an American culture of violence kind of toothless.

Second of all, the manner in which the shooting took place was unique, what with the dorm hit, then the classroom shooting spree. Third of all, I’m standing by my amazement that a lone gunman with two small-caliber handguns could kill so many people. There is so much that could have gone wrong for the shooter, and unfortunately for his victims, none of it did.

By all accounts, this just looks like some really, really awful luck.

Nevertheless, within a week or so the finger pointing will start in earnest. It’s part of the anatomy of a tragedy these days. First the shocking details trickle out. The President expresses horror. More details come out. The next day, we learn who the shooter was. A few days later, though the actual news has been beat to death, we still want to talk about it. So we turn to the op-ed pages. Blogs. Shouting matches on Fox News. There are news conferences where people resign. Maybe other news conferences announcing lawsuits.

The media dances its tragedy dance. Let’s dance along.

I liked Sen. Jim Webb’s response to Bush’s last State of the Union address. It was short, pithy, and elegant - pretty much everything a typical State of the Union address isn’t. But his call to arms for some sort of new class war left me confused. According to Webb, America’s Middle Class is getting screwed. Plenty of people have been taking up that battle cry recently, from Lou Dobbs, to the adorable little Marxists at The Nation, to some Italian investment fund manager who talked my ear off during a very long train ride.

The situation, the Italian told me with his bushy eyebrows furrowed madly, is desperate - a creeping malaise that threatens to overwhelm America’s innocent, helpless middle class in a flurry of medical bills, outsourcing, and shitty compensation. When I did manage to slip a word in, I mentioned that, well, my family is middle class, and they’re doing just fine. He scoffed.

But I think I had a good point. Going down a list of my friends - all of who are middle class like me, some college educated and some not - I’m failing to see any systemic problems. One friend is an architect, recently married, with a kid on the way. Another does something with insurance, and is also married. A third is an engineer and just bought his first house. My brother who recently got married also just got hired as a fire fighter.

Meanwhile, scanning down the list of my friends from school, there are at least two future lawyers, one current lawyer, a steel salesman, a couple of journalists, and a future Marine Corp officer. I should add also that a large majority of my friends - say, 85 percent or so - have achieved a higher level of education than their parents, and that includes myself.

Those of my friends who haven’t “made it” either aren’t really trying to, or would tell you themselves that they kind of fucked up, but they’re working on it.

Yes, all my evidence is anecdotal, and I’m sure there are economists out there who want to throw numbers around that demonstrate our impending economic doom. But if we’re to believe there is some sort of phenomenon sweeping the Heartland, I think I would have heard something about it. Granted Detroit doesn’t seem like a nice place to raise a family these days, and neither does St. Louis. But can one generalize these local economic catastrophes over the entire population?

That’s not to say there aren’t problems. Of course the healthcare system is a disaster, of course immigration needs to be addressed, of course globalization has caused some growing pains.

But war on the Middle Class? Maybe we’re all just too busy with our jobs, families, travel, and leisure time to notice.

Every once in awhile I read something in the New York Times that so fills me with bile and rage that I have to wipe the spittle off my screen and consciously suppress the urge to kill. Today, that something is the nexus of everything that is hateful about upper-middle-class, shit-eating, fluff-tard journalism - the Frankenstein monster of trend story bits salvaged from the smoldering corpse of Parade magazine and sewn together and jolted to life with a bunch of gerrymandered anecdotes.

Headline: Mommy and Daddy’s Little Life Coach

Nut graph: But the nature and pervasiveness of child-to-parent advice has reached new proportions for a variety of reasons. Many parents — who have shed their status as old fogy untouchables and become pals with their progeny — are treating their offspring as worldly equals. They think of their computer-savvy, plugged-in children as confidants, and so they look to them for advice on life decisions, as well as major purchases: cars, computers, vacation packages, real estate, home décor.

Doted-on children! Life coaches! Bullshitting academic quotes! Anecdotes! Statistics like “Many parents”! And even a token criticism:

“It’s so different than when we were growing up,” said Dr. Kavaler, who participates in numerous activities with Sonia and her friends. “Now it’s ‘What do the kids want?’ ” Dr. Kavaler said. “My father would say, ‘Who cares what the kids want?’ ” (Of course, in places like ancient Egypt, where Tutankhamen became King Tut at 8 or 9, they had to care.)

Wait. Did the New York Times just compare the offspring of Manhattanites to the fucking Pharaoh? People! This is why the terrorists hate you! This is why they don’t attack Chicago or L.A. or Dallas or Boston! They attack Manhattan, because they read the New York Times Style section and they think, “I hate these people.”

It turns out there was more to that Bronx fire situation I posted about awhile back. I made an off-hand comment about male-dominated Muslim culture being kind of a problem, but I was a little more right than I realized. Turns out the husband taxi driver was actually a husband twice. He had two wives living in that building.

And today, the New York Times gets a gold star for covering polygamy in the New York African immigrant community. This is the part of the show where cultural relativism starts to look a little bit sick:

Don’t-ask-don’t-know policies prevail in many agencies that deal with immigrant families in New York, perhaps because there is no framework for addressing polygamy in a city that prides itself on tolerance of religious, cultural and sexual differences — and on support for human rights and equality.

Tolerance. Which is all well and good until someone gets her genitals mutilated and is forced at the age of 15 to marry an abusive stranger. If that’s their culture, that’s fine with me.

As long as they keep it in their own shitty country.

A columnist in the LA Times today spends about 800 words carfully not saying that blacks don’t like latinos moving into their neighborhoods. It’s a remarkable little dance:

I know, I know: To feel other than welcoming to new arrivals is to be racist, xenophobic or, at the very least, neurotic about change. I adamantly reject the first two but reluctantly claim the third.

Whew! Glad she’s denied being racist and xenophobic. Now we can all move on.

I guess I could bitch about double standards in race relations, but that’s not the point. The point is, racism between blacks and latinos seems to be kind of an issue, yet everyone is terrified of talking about it.

Even if this column is a little cutesy, it’s at least a start.

New Mexico has outlawed cock fights. Louisiana is the only state left that allows them. It is a curiosity of the American character that while we have no problem eating fried chicken and hot dogs, implicitly approving of the slaughter of chickens and whatever kind of animal ends up in hot dogs, we are appalled by cock fights, outraged when someone kills a dog, and weep bitterly when a horse dies.