Commotion in the Pews

Let’s play a memory game. Do you remember (if you’re of a certain age) when wearing jeans to an office job was totally unacceptable? No jeans. Nada. Ah, good. You do remember. Then someone, probably the most beautiful woman in the office, or the hottest guy, wore a pair of designer jeans and while they got some dirty looks, nobody said a thing.

A month goes by, and then Joe (the beefy guy in the creative writing office) wore a pair of clean, brand new, spiffy jeans from the local Fleet Farm. And nobody said a word because others were wearing jeans and while Joe’s weren’t designer jeans, they were brand new. And nobody had said a word to the first person, or the second, or the most recent one to wear designer jeans. Besides, they thought in office unison, Joe’s too poor to afford the good stuff and he’s never had any fashion sense. Let it go.

Fast forward 20 years and look at that same office. Ewww. Gladys, who has spent a lot of time in drive-through-lanes, but never even been in a gym, much less done hot yoga, is wearing white yoga pants this morning. Again. Same pair, three days this week. Let’s just say that she is a messy eater and leaves stains. Not a pleasant sight. But she’s no worse than Emile who has pre-stressed jeans on that reveal a great deal about her interest in the band Phish and her eclectic tattoo art, a great deal of which is visible through the rips and tears – along with other things.

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In an idyllically selected choice of words, does anyone remember who let the camel’s nose in under the tent? That, by the way, is an allusion to the proclivity of camels to look under the tent, and then uproot the whole thing when they force their way in to the tent. Nope, nobody remembers that it was Sue with the Marithe & Francois Girbaud jeans in 1992 who led the parade. They were so happy that she was wearing anything but the exploding Grunge look that they looked the other way.

Thus we have little Ahmed. Who built a clock and got arrested. Silly racist school officials and cops. Keeping the Muslim-American population down. He deserves to be invited to the White House. Scholarship to MIT? Nothing is too good for this nerdy wunderkind with his steely determination to do well in school. Or to cheat and put a commercially available piece of electronic gear from Radio Shack into another box and pass it off as his own work. In writing, we call that plagiarism. In the world of terrorism and identity politics, we call that a stalking horse. Watch the nice little video and see what I mean.

So Ahmed does his little dance with the fake science project. Who cares? Me. First of all, one look at the picture and I knew it was a scam. How? I’ve put together projects like that for a grade in college. I have that degree in computer science and all, but they wanted to make sure I could do basic electronics. I still have the volt-ohm meter and the soldering iron that I used to make sure the stuff worked.

The soldering was done by a machine. There was an alternating current transformer. No high school teacher would assign ac power to a project when you can use batteries. If they did, the superintendent would have them on the rug for liability issues. Nope, they’d use a battery powered method. Oh, and this little Ahmed was so smart that he included a battery backup just like you’d use in a commercial product so your stupid clock wakes you up in the morning if the power goes out for an hour at night while you’re sleeping. In the style of Foghorn Leghorn, “The boy’s a genius!”

Or, he’s just part of a plan, very long term, to make people uncomfortable questioning any kid from the religion of submission about their motives and methods when the thing looks like a bomb. No, the evil head of the caliphate isn’t bugging my house, nor is he in phone contact with this kid. But a culture, a movement, a plan can be there and we’d never know it if we aren’t aware of the potential. I’d have to wonder why a timing device like this was in a little case. I’d wonder what it was supposed to trigger. But I’m a bit paranoid.

Thank God our esteemed apologist in chief isn’t reluctant to invite little Ahmed to show his cool (plagiarized) clock to the adoring throngs at the White House. Regardless of what you think of Barrack Obama, wouldn’t you wonder just a bit about his lack of advisors that could point out this very basic set of technology issues? Trust me, if GWB had fallen for this bit of theater, they’d be on him like – well, that analogy is for another day.

The moral of the story is that every time one of these things happens, the weaker minds in our midst back further away from confronting threats. Ahmed’s clock represents a threat. One starter for a model rocket, some gunpowder from his cousin Hassan’s dad’s shotgun, and a six inch length of pipe turn this clock into a bomb. Don’t believe me? I’ll build you one in under three minutes if you bring me the ingredients and then you try to enter the local federal building with the package. I’ll even spot you the starter and the gunpowder not being there. Just run the wires into a length of pipe and see the reaction.

I may even come to your funeral. I’m always happy when the gene pool gets skimmed for debris.

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