She screams in silence

I don't usually like to quote the Fox Noise Channel (as it's been so aptly termed by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann), but they had a story on there today that I just had to go with. It seems that a Saudi teenager who was brutally gang-raped is getting justice -- Saudi style. Those Saudi bastards, the ones the President of the United States calls close allies and friends, have sentenced the woman to 90 lashes because she was alone in the presence of another man who wasn't related to her.

As Penn & Teller might say, "Bullshit!"

Try explaining to me now why exactly we're supposed to have compassion for these Muslim extremist motherfuckers who continue to treat women like they're slabs of meat. Fuck it! We shouldn't have bombed Iraq; we should've bombed Saudi Arabia! And while we're at it, let's go after Ethiopia too; after all, they try to fuck with women just the same, as evidenced by Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book.

Obviously, I'm not seriously advocating sending our troops in to fight wars that aren't ours. But all I am asking is for a little fucking transparency. We don't invade these countries because it isn't in our country's influence. Fine! But stop, for the love of Christ, STOP with the assertion that we're helping other peoples out. If we helped out even five Iraqis in this stupid and absolutely directionless war, that help was entirely incidental. And what exactly will we have helped? The Sunnis and Shi'ites in that region are already militaristic nutjobs who'd attack us first chance they get. They've written the motherfucking Koran into their constitution. On what, what, what planet in the existent or nonexistent multiverse does that engender freedom???

Imagine, if you will, faithful readers, that those men who represent the absolute worst of nutjob conservatism -- Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, Roy Moore -- were the crowned princes of the United States. Imagine that they had no boundaries on what they could say and do; rather than censoring their real, in-their-hearts views on the subjugation of women, they could really let loose. Do you realize that these are the types of people who run Saudi Arabia? Do you see where I'm going with this?

The real question, I suppose, is why exactly the Saudi people (or Ethiopians, or Iranians, or whatever) don't rise up against this. Well, I believe it's because we continue to do it for them. Take Iraq. If it hadn't been for us, Iraq would've eventually gone the way of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and, ultimately, the U.S.S.R.: it would've been rendered null and void by the will of the people. That's something that even the Reagan Administration understood. But we don't. You see, you can't make things change overnight or by force from the outside; the revolution has to start within.

However, that's not to say that we can't foster it along. After World War II, we did the right thing: we had the Berlin Airlift working, Mutually Assured Destruction kept both superpowers in check, and we allowed communism, however much we despised it, to exist. Sure, we fought battles against communism elsewhere, but we basically realized that Europe was as communist as it was going to get for the time being. Eventually, through the constant progression of a capitalist republican (purposefully with a lowercase r, kiddies) style of government, people within communism started to see that their lives could be better than they were under communist rule, and they rejected communism. The argument could be made that Mikhail Gorbachev's nyet doctrine is what really spurred these rebels on, but let's face it: if it hadn't been Gorbachev, eventually, it would've been someone else, and while it could've been a bloody battle, the battle would've been waged, and won, by the people.

We're not doing now what we did back then. Rather than showing these Koran-beating bastards that our way of life is better than theirs because women are free to fuck over guys just as well as guys can fuck them over, we're beating it into them that we're superior through military might. Instead of Radio Free Europe, we have bombs. Instead of smuggling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Annie Hall underneath the Berlin Wall, we're smuggling the bin Laden family out of the country. How is this helping?

We need to face the facts, people: we are the ones inflaming the situation. Direct military confrontation, as World War III would've proved, is a bad, bad, bad idea. But if we can get these people the information that they need -- if we can show an Ethiopian man that marrying a virgin really isn't all it's cracked up to be, 'cause let's face it, she's gonna look down at you and wonder what in the blue hell that thing hangin' down is supposed to do (and you don't even wanna know what she's gonna think the first time you pull-n-spray) --, maybe we really can win the War on Terror. Because when it comes down to it, it's really a war of ideals. And while our priorities are misplaced right now, I gotta admit, our ideals are a helluva lot better and nobler than theirs.