Dear Dirty America

In a new book called Failures of Imagination: The Deadliest Threats to Our Homeland–and How to Thwart Them, Michael McCaul reminds us that if you have the right connections, anybody can publish a book. Although it helps to tap into the fear and anxiety that’s been priming Americans since 9/11 to support invasions and long-term occupations overseas.

So why wouldn’t they buy a book like this to keep the panic pumping?

As described by the Washington Examiner:

McCaul presents eight likely attacks, written in the style of the late Tom Clancy, and offers suggestions on how to react.

The most chilling is a biological attack on Orlando’s Disney World, a simple affair that he projects could kill over 1,000.

He writes of how women working in a terror plot launch a lethal smallpox attack at Disney. They deliver it through the type of spray fans people use to stay cool in the summer heat.

Fatimah emerged from the women’s restroom next to the “City Hall” building in the Magic Kingdom’s “Main Street, U.S.A.” area at Disney World. She felt a bit better after having splashed some cold water on her face, but was still feeling faint. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out a handheld electric fan that sprayed water, which she used to spray the air all around her. Before she put it away, she made sure to turn around and spray the bathroom door handle.

Fatimah joined the throngs of people making their way down the “Main Street.” She was not going anywhere in particular. Her job was simply to make a few ambling circuits of the park, maybe wait in some lines for a few minutes, visit the restroom, and generally spend time in areas where she found a high concentration of people. All she had to do was breathe, cough when she felt like it, and remember to use her spraying fan.

—

Maybe little Fatimah was not always so hardcore.

Maybe Fatimah was once a delicate woman living overseas in one of the beautiful, ancient cultures of a Middle Eastern nation undermined by covert CIA operatives and later torn apart by a swollen NATO military force made up of hired mercenaries and terrified young men committing war crimes and bombing crucial infrastructure that disrupts normal, modern living standards.

Maybe Fatimah lost her family in a drone strike on a marketplace or an apartment complex. Or maybe her kid brother was gunned down by a NATO helicopter in Afghanistan.

But that’s not as scary as spraying a smallpox virus around a theme park. At least with drone strikes, there is the consolation that no matter how many innocent people were killed, there is at least one extreme blogger in the bunch who deserved it.

Maybe Fatimah also wrote a book about not the perceived dangers that might cripple her nation’s people, but the real horrors of snipers killing innocent men, women, and children in marketplaces. Perhaps she included in the book what it sounds like to hear missiles streaking overhead and annihilating whole neighborhoods with, you know, real, living people sleeping or working there.

And, the best part is, she didn’t even have to use her imagination.

The rest of us have failed to imagine what we’ve let our leaders do overseas in the name of…what? Oil pipelines? Thwarting Russia? Expanding Pax Americana? Propping up the future Pax Judaica and the genocide of the Palestinians?

Either way, if you’ve got the right publishing connections, you too might want to take a gander at all the horrific things that can be done to people, and then, by pretending your Tom Clancy, whip them blandly into story form, put Middle Eastern names on the characters, and let them wreak havoc on the petite, genteel Western societies.

You might sell a bundle. You might get Fox News to do a segment on the book. You might get interviewed. You might get invited to a party here or there where they serve champagne and those little smoked weenies that people seem to like so much.

But be careful, because it is the gathering of people that make them easy targets for the terrorists. So don’t celebrate too often, or too long, if you want to make it home alive.

[Repetitie televisiespel “Literatuur”. Wim van den Heuvel photo from Jac. de Nijs / Anefo, Nationaal Archief; header photo of actress showcasing initial fear and panic from Bantosh]