When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden Part 3

There's still time, but not much.

When Your Only Right is to Remain Silent

I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty certain that if a woman in a small town in Pakistan or Iran or Syria called the police and said, "My husband is. .h.i.tting me, the cops would say...

"And? Your point is?"

To get away with that here, you have to be a celebrity or an athlete. But females in even the most advanced Muslim countries are simply, by law, not the equal of men. And I'm not just talking about the extremist interpretation of Islam where women are treated as property, must wear head-to-toe burqas, and cannot work or attend school. In most Muslim countries, the Koran is not just a religious text like our Bible, it's a book of laws and an official government handbook. And the Koran's ideas about women are fifteen hundred years old, like Tony Curtis's. It defines women as the property of men to be "maintained" and physically disciplined. Put it this way: you're not going to see the Koran on Oprah's Book Club.

As I've said, we are in a Clash of Civilizations, and nowhere is that more clear than in the treatment of women. I sometimes look at pictures of women covered with tarps like the infield at Fenway Park, and I think: What if these were black men in some white country? Black men being beaten for showing an ankle or a wrist? Black men dying because it was against the law for them to receive medical attention? Black men starving to death because they weren't allowed to work or stoned to death for having s.e.x? There would be protests, riots, U.N. boycotts. Jesse Jackson's head would explode. Al Sharpton would call a press conference.

Isn't it time we stopped ignoring the elephant in the living room and let go of our fair-minded fantasy that all religions are basically the same and that other cultures that suppress human rights aren't inferior, they're just different? Excuse me, but primitive is primitive. The Sudan and Ethiopia and many other countries still practice the genital mutilation of women. The Hmong tribe in Laos observe "marriage by capture," which is a really nice way of saying rape. Remember that Vietnam movie with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox where American soldiers abduct the pretty teenage girl "for a little R&R?" It's kind of like that, except there's no Michael J. Fox around to decry that people know about it and "they don't care!"

But really, do we care? Isn't it time we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept any behavior codified within religious or cultural practice? Is there no line to be drawn? If honor killings are okay, then why not virgin sacrifices or cannibalism or s.e.x with children outside the church? We have perversely taken our notion of tolerance to such extremes that we've become tolerant of intolerance.

In the interest of our own preservation and safety, we have to pull back the veil from Islam's face and see it for what it is, not just a religion but a philosophy that fuels the fire of anti-Americanism, an ideology that, like communism, is in theory benevolent and humane but in the hands of many people, vicious, repressive and deadly. When making a stand against communism, we didn't defend it as a peaceful idea that had been hijacked; we didn't pretend that it wasn't dangerous just because we hoped most people living under it would rather be free like we are. We fought it.

Not that Americans are clean on the issue of women, and a little perspective is in order. Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a s.e.x crime. Or this: I'm a middle-aged American writing in the year 2002, and when my mother was born, women in America couldn't vote. Slavery was abolished in 1865; women began voting in 1920. We are ourselves relatively new to this tolerance game, and shouldn't act like the recent immigrant who tells the even more recent immigrant to "go back where you came from." We're all lucky in America that we live in a society that does change and grow and self-corrects. Societies can get stuck in a ditch; Islam has been in one for a while, although not for lack of brains or ingenuity or pa.s.sion. Traditions bind people, and then change comes slowly.

The frustrating thing is, it doesn't have to. Mankind has shown the ability to change, and change quickly. An entire society's long-held, core beliefs can be obliterated in a decade. Following World War II, j.a.pan was occupied and the emperor was forced to announce over the radio that he was not, in fact, G.o.d-a t.i.tle, along with others in his portfolio, emperors had been claiming since the third century.

How's that for a "I never had s.e.x with that woman"? Talk about needing a spin doctor!

"It has come to my attention that mistakes have been made by some overzealous members of the Royal Court, two of the finest public servants I know, and while I knew in my brain it was not the right thing to claim to be the ruler of the universe, my heart told me differently, and when I said I 'was' G.o.d, it depends on your definition of 'was'..."

But in just ten years, the j.a.panese were crazy in love with a new girl, capitalism, and in twenty they were beating us at selling our own stuff, like radios and TVs. No one has to be doomed by faith forever. You can change the fairy tale people need to get through the day. People are sheep, and can be driven to a new pasture in a short amount of time.

Kemal Ataturk did it in Turkey-ruthlessly, I'm sure-but in a decade's time, he yanked an entire nation out of the Middle Ages and religious servitude and set them on an opposite course from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey banned the fez and the veil and made citizens take surnames. The Islamic calendar was replaced with a Western one. They abolished religious laws and polygamy, inst.i.tuted a secular justice system, and gave women rights. I'm sure that Ataturk broke more than a few eggs making this little omelet, but sorry, I'm a fan. His giant country had-almost literally-no more than a toehold in Europe, and he still managed to pull it to that side of the Bosporus.

And in the long run, don't many more people die and suffer from not not having that painful modern-ectomy performed on their body politic? having that painful modern-ectomy performed on their body politic?

Any society needs what women bring to the party; it's too vast a contribution to do without, being, you know, half of the population half of the population. And while I don't subscribe to the silly American pandering (which I believe is also the law now) that women are superior, neither are they inferior. The Muslim world will never catch up until they learn to use all their "manpower," including what's under the tarp.

And Americans will never be able to truly count themselves on the side of human rights as long as SO much of the world-hardly just the Muslims-continues to get away with systemic, society-sanctioned mistreatment of women, under the guise of cultural differences. Americans should never stop being proud that the soldiers of our army were the liberators of Afghanistan. Once there, we a.s.sessed the situation for what it was: Afghanistan was the battered wife, the Taliban the abusive husband, and us the cops. We came, we bombed, we put our necks on the line, and the wife beating stopped. According to my comic books, the guy who comes in and kicks the a.s.s of the "evildoer" is the superhero.

2017.

You know how there's a part in every book where the author asks you for money? There's not? Well, there is now.

And it's for a good cause-a charity I'd like to start called "Change for Change," which would collect everyone's pocket change before they went through the airport metal detector, and use it to help fight the War on Terrorism. Right there, on one of its front lines, the airport.

The first question I asked, and kept asking, after 9/11 was: "Can we change?" Can people still change enough to survive, which is what animals do-smart ones, anyway. Which part of our polarized human mind is going to win out-the part that's smart enough to invent nuclear weapons, or the part that uses one to get to heaven?

I worry that the powerful human tendency not to change, to stay with the devil you know, is ill-suited for an age of such rapid movement. Maybe centuries ago you could leisurely evolve over time-but with loose nukes and crazy people who want them, I'm for getting our act together fast.

But fast isn't what government does in America. Food we do fast. Dry cleaning, if you believe the sign. But for the United States government and the citizens who move it, it may take more than September 11 to start moving quickly. To give just one horrifying example: Two months after the attacks, on Veteran's Day 2001, another plane mysteriously fell out of the sky in Queens, N.Y.. leading many to wonder if there might have been a bomb planted on board, not a far-fetched scenario since 90% of the luggage in America was still going unscreened. And there was as yet no system in place matching pa.s.sengers with their luggage. However, spirits had been raised just the week before when, responding to pressure from 9/11. The FAA announced that screening would be fully operational in 2017.

I'm not kidding, that was their target date. 2017. A mere sixteen years-why, the same amount of time I believe it took Hannibal to cross the Alps. But hey, planes into buildings, planes into houses-what's the rush?

No screening till 2017, but the mimes and street performers were in place relaxing people, and security personnel were now on orders to address pa.s.sengers by name with a smile. Because, as you know, some time ago in America we decided it was more important to be nice than right.

But then, on September 11 everything changed, except it didn't.

But it needs to, and that's the driving idea behind "Change for Change." So if someday soon YOU see a bucket with those words on it, give it up. The line will move faster with nothing to retrieve (and also if everyone in America wasn't Mr. and Mrs. Howell and would just pack what you need!) Do you really want to hold the rest of us up over your precious seventy-seven cents? If you really need a sticky fistful of coins that badly, maybe you should skip the trip and go back to work.

If nothing else, when people see the "Change for Change" bucket they'll be reminded that security in America has to change, that we can't have everything we had before plus the new thing we need now: better security. Sorry, not a win-win-so few things ever really are. We're going to have to lose a few things that we have come to enjoy, like total convenience and political correctness.

It's the best thing you can do right now with your change at the airport. Because you do know those nuns are fake, right?

No Security

The 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was the site of an odd controversy-and, for once, it didn't involve figure skating. At the opening ceremonies, the Americans insisted upon carrying the tattered Ground Zero flag of 9/11, as if to say to the world, "Lest we never forget... what happened a few weeks ago."

Or, more accurately, "what happened to us us a few weeks ago." Because-let's face it-that was the subtext: "We're special and when something bad happens to us it's worse than when it happens to you." Name a nation that does not have its share of tattered flags? The Jews and the Irish, to pick the two random peoples I come from, have drawers full of them. Everyone does. The march of history is a b.l.o.o.d.y mess-I doubt if Monaco has been spared. But no one else imposes their torn laundry and tragic past on this dumb luge and kettle-bowling festival. a few weeks ago." Because-let's face it-that was the subtext: "We're special and when something bad happens to us it's worse than when it happens to you." Name a nation that does not have its share of tattered flags? The Jews and the Irish, to pick the two random peoples I come from, have drawers full of them. Everyone does. The march of history is a b.l.o.o.d.y mess-I doubt if Monaco has been spared. But no one else imposes their torn laundry and tragic past on this dumb luge and kettle-bowling festival.

I will never believe that what happened on 9/11 was justified, or that those people deserved to die, but I sure do understand how carrying on like American lives hold more value than lives from anywhere else is annoying to the rest of the world. And there's no denying that's exactly what we do. Certainly the media presents it that way, and being the media, I have to believe they're pandering to what people want, which apparently is always saying things like: "A cyclone in Bangladesh killed 80,000... two were Americans!"

Right after 9/11, the blow-dried twinks who pa.s.s for sages on television were fond of saying "It's a whole new world," when, of course, it's not, we just got a taste of the world as most people have been experiencing it for a long time. I heard a "man in the street" in Cairo-or maybe it was Jalalabad-say "Now Americans will know what it's like to live life with no security."

And that's true, now we do. But we should have known that long before September 11. Certainly the bombing of the emba.s.sies in Kenya and Tanzania- that is U.S. soil-should have been a wake-up call... buuuut, the bodies being pulled out of the wreckage were black and African, so... hey, who's Pam Anderson dating now? Unless Connie Chung can do a lip-biting "profile" of the victims, it didn't really happen.

Blacks here in America can relate to that. Remember when Columbine freaked out white, middle-cla.s.s America, and the people in the inner cities were saying, "h.e.l.lo!? Guns-in-schools equals bad, thanks for catching on when it's about you.

Compounding the affront is the self-righteous posturing our faux-spiritual country constantly puts on display. We talk a good game about G.o.d and religion and mankind and humility, but in reality it's a lot about G.o.d blessing America and really thinking the Jews got it wrong, we're the chosen people. It's like the whole country is Mann County.

Leaving the question: Does G.o.d make humans or Americans?

In Broadcast News, William Hurt, as the bimbo newscaster of his era, asks Albert Brooks, "What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?"

"Keep it to yourself," is the reply.

If you're an American horn in the second half of the twentieth century, you're lucky. You've won the world power ball lottery. But have some humility about being born on third base. It might help keep the heat off the rest of us.

A Game of Inches

Bad a.n.a.logies bother me, none more than those that were sp.a.w.ned by the War on Terrorism. Timothy McVeigh isn't like bin Laden; asking Arabs to answer a few questions at the airport isn't like putting j.a.panese-Americans in camps; and September 11 isn't like Pearl Harbor.

In 1941. the bombing of Pearl Harbor was the worst possible thing that an enemy could do to us. There was no larger-scale option that might have wreaked even more havoc and taken even more American lives.

Not true of 9/11. Despite the staggering death toll and the incredible damage. planes-into-buildings is paltry compared to what the enemy might have pulled off. In this nuclear-biological warfare age, there is no margin for error.

History is a game of inches. We beat Hitler to the atom bomb by probably not more than months (and probably because he drove a lot of smart Jews over here in the 30s-the only known time in history someone has been punished for mistreating Jews).

We don't know how many inches nearer the haters are today to having the kind of weapons that will get a guy 72 thousand virgins! It's hard to scare people who want to die, but except for a thin layer of the real fruitcakes, even most nuts and zealots can be scared into behaving, and we need to do some of that. They said Saddam Hussein was crazy when the Gulf War began, but actually, he loves his job, and he wants to keep it, along with his a.s.s and arteries, so when it was made clear to him "you go biological, we go nuclear," he got sane real fast. The j.a.panese were notorious for welcoming death until Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed them what it looked like on a ma.s.sive scale. And the reason no one has fired off a nuclear missile in the fifty-seven years since Nagasaki is MAD-mutually a.s.sured destruction. Key word: a.s.sured. That's right, a.s.sured, as in, "please, let me a.s.sure you, if you kill a lot of us, we'll kill all of you-rest a.s.sured."

Terrorists only understand the cold, unforgiving hammer of brute force. Sorry, but we need "MAD for Muslims." The terrorists threw a good scare into us, but now we have to scare them and the people who help them. If I were the president, I would stretch the already accepted Bush Doctrine of "any country that harbors terrorists will be considered terrorists themselves" to include "any nation harboring a terrorist bringing a nuclear bomb into the United States, even if it's brought over in a PBS tote hag, will be considered to have fired a nuclear missile at the United States, with everything that implies."

There must be a nuclear deterrent put in place regarding this threat equal to the one that worked for so long with the Russians. The only thing keeping certain people from killing all of us immediately is that they can't. In a republic such as ours, where leaders write policies based on the will of the people, it's everybody's job to keep it that way.

Volunteers

2001 will always he remembered as the year that the United States, for the first time in decades, found itself in a life-or-death struggle, hoping its citizens would say "How do I help? What can I personally do to stand up to these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?"

Well, if you're like most Americans, it's by being extra rude to the Indian family who owns the 7-Eleven. Okay, so our beef isn't exactly with the folks from Bangalore, or Sikhs who practice a different religion entirely, but they're brown-skinned and Middle-Eastern-sounding and...close enough!

"Hey, Mohammed, how much for the Slim Jim?"

Sacrifice used to be commonplace in America-but we're a little out of practice. It's going on three generations since anyone in America was really asked to do squat, even though fake patriots love to say things like "we built this country" to separate themselves from later arriving ethnic groups-as if they built anything. No, the railroads were pretty much up and running by 1980.

President Kennedy's "Ask not..." line is a cla.s.sic because there was no cynicism in it; it wasn't just political elevator music from the latest corporate empty suit to "lead" us. It was taken literally, by a generation who'd saved the world, listening to a guy who'd been there. The young men who waited on line to enlist for World War II were the children of the Great Depression. They knew about doing their share, accepting hard realities, and going to bed hungry. They got an orange for Christmas and they were d.a.m.n glad to get it! It was a generation that knew dying isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. Boys as young as 16 and 17 with falsified birth records showed up just out of knickers for the honor of serving their country. If a kid today has a fake ID, it's to get into the Viper Room.

But that's what the Greatest Generation wanted for their kids-to spare them. To give them an easier life than the one they'd been handed. In the process, of course, they ruined them, but hey, it's like the old Chinese proverb says: "One generation plants the tree-another gets the shade." And boy is there a lot of shade out there for the kids today!

What's really scary about them is that they're second and third-generation lazy. "When I was your age, we didn't sit around and watch football. We played football.., on Nintendo."

But whose fault is it? How can we expect kids who've been brought up on the notion that they're more precious than anything else to suddenly understand living for a n.o.bler ideal? Forget acting like the World War II generation, most of these kids today are such brats, they resent having to even hear about the World War II generation. Or anything before MTV. Do you know what anyone under 25 says when you question why they don't know about some monumentally important event in world history? They say, "How should I know about that, I wasn't even born!"

I wasn't born. That's the key, the "I" part. If I wasn't around for it, it didn't happen, and it doesn't matter. There's rarely a young adult, even the bright ones, who I talk to and at some point don't think, "I can't believe they let you out of school not knowing that!" And how shameful that my generation, spoiled though we may have been by our supermoms, let our kids grow up decadent and stupid, and all because boomers were spared pain and so can't take pain, including the pain of having your kid momentarily hate you because you're doing the right thing. Because you're teaching, you're disciplining, you're keeping it real, instead of being your kids' "friend" and negotiating with them and bribing them with empty blandishments and rewards. We give kids trophies for losing and compliments for just existing and tell them "I love you!" every five seconds, which is so insecure and annoying.

It's no wonder that to get a young man to even consider enlisting he has to be bribed into it the same way his parents bribed him to clean up his room. The military is forced to lure people in with embarra.s.sing TV commercials that promise adventure and college tuition, or that they can be part of a unit but still remain "an army of one." And if they're really high, there's the one with the ridiculous ruse that being a Marine is pretty much like being in a video game as a knight on a horse fighting exploding dragons.

We've created a culture that makes caring about anything other than yourself seem like losing. The ads talk about joining the army for yourself, your family, your coach, because Grandma got you up for school and made you breakfast (and sometimes took care of your sister's crack baby). What happened to "Do it for your country"? Instead it's like a Bally's gym ad: "You'll get in the best shape of your life."

Immediately following 9/11 it was reported that inquiries to military recruitment offices had skyrocketed. Yeah, the inquiries skyrocketed. The enlistments did not. "Before 9A.M., you say? Listen, I'm getting beeped on the other line."

I was once asked to cut a public service ad against teen smoking, but it never aired because they didn't like what I said, which was: "Kids, if you think smoking is cool, let me tell you something: you're right. Smoking is cool. It's very cool. Which is why if you need it to be cool, you're not that cool."

I'd like to expand that message to young people today who consider the ent.i.tlement of an all-volunteer army to be a birthright and would never think about enlisting because they're too cool for it.

You're not. Oh, we give the military great lip service today-this isn't the 60s when we bashed them to their face. But the proof is in what people do, and increasingly, joining up is simply for those with few other options, so don't tell me the kids think it's cool.

But it is. And there are some people who get that. In fact, I'll tell you about one of them in just a moment.

A Hill of Beans

So much talk, so little action. But, that's the way it has to be if we want to persist in stretching the meaning of "hero" the way we stretch the meaning of everything else in America. If a "suite" is any room in a hotel, and having s.e.x with a girl when she's drunk counts as "rape," then "heroes" can be anyone caught in harm's way.

Except they're not. Victims find themselves in harm's way, heroes put themselves in harm's way. Trapped miners are not heroes; they're guys in a hard job who ran into some bad luck. It's also not heroic to "beat" cancer or prevail in any other endeavor where your motivation is totally saving or advancing your own a.s.s. A hero sacrifices something on purpose, something big. When a culture purposefully blurs that distinction, they're already making excuses for losing.

The airmen who landed our crippled spy plane in China in April of 2000 were lauded as heroes; they may he, but not for that. It's certainly heroic just to choose military service in this prosperous, indulgent society, and for that alone all our servicemen are due our ultimate respect. But the heroic thing to do in the situation over Communist China would have been to not land the spy plane with the treasure trove of intelligence data.

"The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world," Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca.

I had to laugh in 1997 when critics kept comparing Casablanca to that year's Oscar winner The English Patient, because both films involved a man caught between a woman he loved and the greater cause of winning World War II. Of course, in 1943 the hero-Bogart-chooses the war instead of the girl, and in 1996 the "hero" does the exact opposite-a slight change in values.

In the forties, when Ted Williams first gave up his lucrative and magnificent baseball career to go fight the Germans, that was heroism, but it was also routine. Jimmy Stewart was a huge movie star, and he went, as did Gable and Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power and plenty of others. Rich kids, too, like Jack Kennedy and George Herbert Walker Bush, also signed up, because some things were more important than money. Nowadays, we talk a good game about how much we love and support our military personnel, but the truth is it's a mercenary army made up of the poorest members of society with the most limited career choices, who stand up and fight so we don't have to. The public is really no more in touch with the soldiers who protect them than millionaire athletes today are in touch with the fans.

Which is why a Pat Tillman is so impressive. Because Pat Tillman is doing the same thing Ted Williams did, but he's doing it today. Today, when a guy would have to be missing the padding in his helmet to even consider giving up the multi-million dollar contracts and the endors.e.m.e.nt deals all so he can go eat sand in c.r.a.pistan for eighteen grand a year.

But that's exactly what Tillman is doing, having said goodbye to his $1.2-million-dollar-a-year job as the Arizona Cardinals leading tackler.

When it comes to understanding that "hero" is higher than "celebrity," and not the other way around, Pat Tillman gets it. Lots of Americans don't, including the media, who attempt to "celebrify" every legitimate hero of 9/11, and even did it to the first soldier killed in Afghanistan, CIA agent Johnny Spann. You couldn't watch a news broadcast the week he died without seeing some tear-jerk piece about his career and his wife and his three children and exactly where he lived- you know, all the information a dead CIA operative would want out there. Forget that he was a member of a clandestine service or that publicizing his personal life might put his family at risk, the important thing was that we got an Access Hollywood segment out of it.

If you don't love Pat Tillman already for leaving football for life, and maybe death, how about this: he did the whole thing, made such a drastic change in his life, without sitting for one interview, or in any way involving the media.

I don't know about you, but that's a hero to me.

If You Know the Enemy and Know Yourself

I n a widely viewed and widely praised television appearance, Dan Rather came on David Letterman's show the first night back alter 9/11, and when asked by Dave why-why did it happen-the dean of TV journalism said: "Who can explain madmen? Who can explain evil? It's very difficult for anyone in western civilization, much less our United States of America, to understand this type of hate... there's no trying to explain it... some evil just can't he explained."

I guess we were all a little emotional that night-and Dan did keep me in st.i.tches on Election Night, 2000-but still, this is exactly the wrong message.

The Art of War says, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succ.u.mb in every battle."

Or, as George C. Scott put it as Patton, "Rommel, you magnificent b.a.s.t.a.r.d-I read your book!" What a concept, huh? Learning something. Instead of, "Who knows what the n.a.z.is are like? Let's just attack!"

That approach we tried in Vietnam.

If we agree that 9/11 was a crime on a grand scale, then what kind of criminal are the terrorists? If we say "It's just hate, we can't understand it," then we're saying they're like some insane serial killer. They're John Wayne Gacy, the man who dressed as a clown and buried little boys in his back yard. Who could understand that?

But that's not the kind of criminal the terrorists are. They're a gang, a strong one, with organization. money, motivation and the active support of millions of Muslims around the world, and the tacit support of probably hundreds of millions. "Just hate" won't cut it.

It's not enough anymore to keep referring to a "shadowy enemy." They're shadowy because we don't know anything about them and don't seem particularly interested in finding out. We're not shadowy to them-in fact, we're transparent. They did their homework on us, taking advantage of our weaknesses and our tendencies. They cased the joint, and fit in well enough in a culture they despised (well, it was a love-hate thing, really) to pull off 9/11. Could we do the same in their culture?